


Cor Ceruleum

by elebuu, rahelawriter



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 2.0 WoL, A love Story, F/M, FFXIV 1.0, Omega raid spoilers, SMN, Slow Burn, Summoner WoL, Time Travel, WIP, omega - Freeform, paradoxes, seventh umbral calamity, some nsfw, some violence, the Interdimensional Rift
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2018-12-03 14:13:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11533905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elebuu/pseuds/elebuu, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rahelawriter/pseuds/rahelawriter
Summary: Credit to rahelawriter for being my lore voice, editor, and general co-conspirator. <3~A traveller from worlds apart became Eorzea's champion five years after the Seventh Umbral Calamity. When she crosses paths with another being from the Rift, the last fixed and stable point to which she can escape precedes the day that Hydaelyn first called her name. But once you've met someone, you never really forget them...~





	1. //. the uncertainty principle

**Author's Note:**

> *CAUTION - starting premise is setting/environment spoilers for the Omega V1-4 raid cycle.*

Evening caught Jyera na Derdres unawares in the reddish glow of the sandstone hills she stood between. A low breeze, the whines of wild creatures, and the occasional shuddering clicks of fallen machina made up the majority of the sound in her ears, and the minutes drifted off into hypnotic hours as she watched the swirling coils of the lake in front of her. Wine-dark and serous as sugar, the unhappy mixture churned anxiously as she crouched above it, on the lip of the hill just short of its shoreline. With the heat of the Gyr Abanian sun building up in the auburn tangle of her hair, she felt nearly as miserable, herself.

Not so the cheerful figure approaching her from behind. She turned her head at the sound of heavy boots treading as softly as possible through the stiff sand. Cid smiled at her warmly, an arm raised in greeting. He strode in the path of the falling sun, his silhouette framed in its amber halo. Jyera’s eyes widened and a smile of her own opened as she pushed herself up to a stand and moved to meet him. “Cid! Thank gods, I was starting to wonder if I was going to have to spend the rest of my life watching that thing.”

She caught him in an embrace that sent a cloud of loose sand up from behind his feet, and with an amused _oof!_ he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her to her toes. “Aye, it isn’t what I would call a relaxing sight. I hope you weren’t waiting too long.”

She squeezed. “No. An hour, no more, I think. Just a long one.”

Reluctantly, Cid set her back down on her feet and withdrew from the embrace, unsnapping the bag at his hip to fetch a small leather-bound notepad. “Ah… here. They aren’t as substantial as I’d hoped, but these are the readings from the event last night. No bloody idea what’s going on in there, but I reckon our Omega’s upset about _something_.”

Jyera took the notes with both hands and frowned, reading through his hurried, fatigued handwriting. “These are _terrible._ It’s as if there was some sort of earthquake in there. Is our camp alright?”

Cid cocked his head sideways and rested his hands on his hips. “Mmmph. I’m not sure. It isn’t exactly a luxury hideaway, but, as its current favourite plaything,” he wagered, wincing a little sympathetically in her direction, “I thought you would be a fitting accomplice in a little intrusion on the place. Just to do a few diagnostics, probably, and in a manner of speaking you know the place better than I.”

She smiled, softening the skewed expression born of the ‘plaything’ moniker. “What of our little escort? I thought without assistance, we’d start… start to fade out once we stepped foot into the Deltascape.”

He nodded sagely, bringing a hand up to his chin and rubbing at his beard a little thoughtfully. “In spite of that, it seems those of us that already paid it a visit have a stable presence there. Wander any further, though, and I can only agree we’ll be lost.”

Jyera gestured to him to take the little pad of scrawlings back. “All right! Let’s go, before we lose the rest of the daylight.” The pair glanced at the horizon, russet with age. She felt him brush the back of his broad hand on hers, then the comforting mantle of his callused palm and fingertips wrapping around hers.

“Thank you… old friend.” She felt the firm, plush surface of his coat against her forehead as she nuzzled, just before they were engulfed in the dark cloud of the aether pond.

~

 

“…Well. That doesn’t look right, does it?”

The two looked up to find the expanse in which the Ironworks had carved out a little workstation badly altered by juxtaposed elements that had nothing to do with the trials of the Deltascape. Jyera’s voice felt small and stifled. Cid leaned over the console where he had last been stationed and began to tinker with the interface.

“That explains the rhythm in the aether spikes we saw last night. The whole interior of the place is essentially…” He paused, brows tightening and darkening the worry line high over the bridge of his nose, as if searching for the proper term.

“Vandalised?”, Jyera offered, and he flashed her a warm, encouraged grin.

“Aye, that fits. Everything you’ve interacted with here has started changing its presentation. Might I ask a favour of you? It’s only a hunch, but—“

Jyera beamed. “I would be happy to! What did you have in mind, exactly?”

“Do you see the platform across from us? There are two more of those monitors on it. I need you to switch one on and try to connect to a signal from this one—it’s still working fine, apparently—ruling out that it might be an intentional change to Omega’s designs. I’ve suspicions… but they’re rather beside the point at present.”

Jyera stepped carefully to the edge of their platform until the electromagnetic tingle of the transporter played on her skin. She was over the chasm in a flash.

“…All right, it looks like it’s working just fine, too. …It doesn’t seem to like me trying to access the map of the arena you have.” She swallowed hard. Something was more amiss than a little visualization.

Cid huffed and shook his head. “I doubt it will do much to soothe your worries, but this one is doing it now, too. …By gods, actually, the map’s changed. None of the arenas we saw you enter looked like this. This is—these are the blueprints for Castrum Abania. The hells…”

“What? Hold… I’m coming back over there. Just going to try to send you a readout.” She lifted a hand to the side of the console and flicked the controls for a local transmission.

That was all it took to cleave the little monitor in two. The metal split with a groan and a spitting noise of regurgitated static, and the geometric sky above them twitched again, splicing another senseless image of Jyera’s journeys into the constellation of simulation errors that shook the platforms on which they stood.

“What in _hells_ is it doing?!”, Cid cried. “These look like—“

“They _are_ ,” Jyera called out in baleful surprise. “I don’t know why—I don’t know why--!” She staggered as one of the diamond-plated islands above her shuddered and sank, sending waves of force through the metal on which she stood. Her hands flapped uselessly at the air until they found another metal grip. She clutched at it, pulling herself back up, and had just enough time to right her posture before an inexplicable wind pummeled her in the shoulders. “What is _happening_?”

Cid fared only a little better, so tightly he held on to the remaining monitor. “Godsdamnit, this is far worse than the pattern last night… Jyera! Keep an eye on that bloody thing! I think it’s responding to _you_!” Jyera pried her eyes open, and they stung in the continuous blasts from falling islands. The astral map projected in spinning circles through the Deltascape skyline shivered, and still more stolen images of her travels glitched into its windows. To her horror, she could now see why.

“Cid—gods—it’s going in order. It’s a _record_ —it’s going back through everything I’ve done, everywhere I-I’ve—“ She stopped dead in the middle of that thought for the scream of a dozen of the arena’s monitors swarming in front of her. They were replaying a frame-by-frame scene somewhere in central Thanalan, and she thought she recognized the slow-moving carriage plodding down its main dust road.

“ _Dammit._ What I would not give to have something recording this from outside—Jyera!” Cid lurched to the side and down onto one foot; the sky that had seemed endless before was releasing whole fault lines’ worth of its contents as walls of crystal and steel that crashed into the islands and causeways in front of them. He had ducked his head in just enough time not to take a long sheet of crystallised images straight to the skull. They were, he realized as he saw one shatter, pieces somehow of Jyera’s first meeting with him. He felt ill watching the cracks form in the frozen matrix that projected her face. “Can you still reach the platform I’m on? As I don’t doubt you’re aware, we have to leave, _now_!”, he called, his voice straining to project past the screech of tearing metal and breaking glass.

Jyera answered him by breaking into a terrified run as she released her grip, and made the blind leap toward their base camp. The island on which she’d been standing floated at a contorted angle beside her, and then further, further away from her. She landed with an ungraceful slap against the metal platform that sent shocks through her temples. “I haven’t the faintest idea why, but without putting words into its proverbial mouth, the damned place seems to be scouring its scans of you for a complete record of your life history. Are you all right?” Cid’s voice was hoarse, his angled blue eyes uncharacteristically fearful.

“Y-yes,” Jyera mumbled in reply, her vision doubling mildly as she tried to focus on him. “Why does it have my memories--?” Her question died on her tongue when she placed a fumbling palm on the platform’s surface to try coming to a stand. The metal against her flesh was beginning to warp and hiss, turning into another scene. The flow of some aetherial ocean—the slumber before an Echoing dream—and as she locked eyes with Cid, who leaned out into the growing chaos to help her to her feet, it dawned on them both.

“Your origin. It’s looking for you in time—gods, Jyera, tell me--” She found her wits and pushed through the thickening air to take his hands. Cid pulled her behind the eroding tower of stacked terminals that remained of their monitoring station, his arms coiled tightly around her shoulders. “It’s a hells-sent excuse for a guess, but on the chance this is just our Omega throwing a tantrum for more data—I need you to tell me.” Jyera squeezed at his elbows as he loosened only enough for them to make eye contact again.

“Tell me—where did you come from? Before Eorzea? Before you were an adventurer here, anywhere in Aldenard—gods, that I haven’t asked yet—where you were born, even?” Regret glistened in his eyes as if to say _‘this was not how I imagined asking you’._ Jyera thought for absolute certain that her heart had just stopped beating in her chest. She was stunned as the bands of simulated constellations in the Rift themselves began to unstick from the heavens and plunge into the depths of whatever the Deltascape was becoming. One long moment passed as they tried to overcome speechlessness, the mortal seconds of which forced her out of purgatorial silence.

“I don’t know.”

Cid’s eyes became as two wide, disbelieving oceans set into a sculpture of crestfallen awe. He leaned toward her forehead, his lips forming the words for something gentle, if desperately afraid. He would not be able to finish them, for the roar of the reeling daguerreotyped timelines surrounding them both exploded into a draft that left numbing silence in its wake, and the plane on which he and his Warrior of Light were standing erupted into dovecot cracks that wrenched her out of his arms.

He made to move forward to catch her, shouting against the null-decibel haze, and as she cast out her arms to reach him, the plane on which he still stood cracked behind him. The stack of ruined monitors peeled away, sent adrift, and Cid’s expression was one of terrorized denial. He strained to keep his arm outstretched to her.

The ambivalent yawn of ruptured space and time pulled him out of her sight faster than any world in decay should have been able to. Jyera screamed, unbelieving, unable to believe. She closed, reopened, closed and reopened her eyes, and he was still gone. Cid Garlond was _gone_.

She screamed louder and louder, as if it would somehow dispel what was surely no more than a cruel illusion, thrumming the suffocating null space with her cries. She did not notice when the distorted metal on which she had stood slid away from her, lilting to the side of her, until it, too, sank into the flooding plane.

The aetherial sea rushed into her ears, slamming against her sobbing eyes, silencing her howling mouth, and the non-world went dark all around her.

~


	2. //..as if she fell from a shower of stars

_Hear._

_Feel._

_Think._

 

Jyera na Derdres did each of these in turn. A fair, if obtuse exercise for a drowning woman. She recognized the crooning voice and silhouette of the speaker. _Mother. Mother…?_

A familiar face, whose golden hair floated around her head, braided with ribbon the hue of roses, smiled at her from the ripples of the shifting sea. “ _Hear. Feel. Think. Oh, Jyera. What has happened to you, daughter of Light?_ ”

Jyera rolled her aching head, not quite understanding. A dying turmoil of discordant music tried to give her the words to explain, but failed.

_I don’t know where I come from. I don’t know how I found this world. I was just… travelling…_

Her Mother nodded gently, as if understanding completely. “ _I see… Listen, Warrior of Light. However afar you were born—however many worlds away—you are of this world. You were long in your becoming, but you do belong. I can take you home.”_ Jyera shook her head violently, thrashing as fiercely as the heavy and tranquil currents would allow.

_No! It’s broken, something is broken. This is all wrong… I should have…_

The figure paused, hovering beside her. As another cool wave washed over them, She spoke again. “ _Daughter of Light—my friend. As you once gave your light to that world… would you give it again, to that which preceded it, that I might guide you home?”_ Jyera did not understand. At her silence, the Mother continued. “ _It is true. You were not born on this star… I brought you home for my own, from where you wandered in the Rift. My gift to you allowed you to stay in this world—and then you became its champion. I am sorry that this secret at last emerged…_ ”

Jyera let the waves carry her. She was limp, a slumbering embryo of a person. Her eyes flickered open, each a dreaming purple lamp, on the cusp of recollection. “ _If you would return to the Eorzea you have made your home… I have found you a safe place therein to land, though… in the pulse of Time, the Eorzea you know and love is a world yet unmade. Would that I had the strength to undo what is to come… but our world yet lives. If you would go there… heal this pain that was born of the Rift… it will be reborn. You will, as you always have, be its hope.”_ Jyera began to hear her own heartbeat again. Her hand willed itself to reach for her Mother’s, and with new, inexplicable tears in her eyes, she nodded until all was a blur.

“ _Oh, thank you… may you walk ever in the light of the Crystal. My friend. Blessed daughter…_

_…walk free. Walk free. Walk free.”_

 

The piercing light of the midday sun opened above her. With the heat and light of a shower of stars around her head, Jyera fell from the heavens into a cascade of green.

 


	3. //._pulling my own weight

“By the Matron,” a voice beside her said, “What in the _world_ were you doing out there?”

Jyera turned her head toward the sound, surprised to find her body slightly uncooperative. “I know you adventurer types set ridiculous standards for yourselves, but this was a bit much, don’t you think?” She blinked dully a few times at the woman next to her bed.

“Hold still. We’ve got the woodsin off you, mostly, but you’ve done enough to your head to warrant another day of care.” The woman then laid a crooked bit of flowering yew branch by her head, and swiftly removed the bandaging from it. Jyera inhaled sharply, her brain swimming, but her attendant ignored the sound and simply tilted the blooming fingers of the crook toward the site of the worst radiating pain. Very, very slowly, the sick feeling left her, although it seemed like several more sluggish minutes before she could open her eyes again.

“Gods know what made you think that was a good idea. Things are tense enough without would-be adventurers _falling out of trees_ on a busy afternoon.”

“I fell out of a tree?” Jyera found herself replying.

“Something to that effect,” the chirurgeon replied gruffly. Only, with instruments like the yew branch at hand, chirurgery might not be this woman’s trade after all. _Conjury! That was it_ , Jyera recalled—meaning, more than likely, that this was the deep wooded city-state of Gridania. For reasons she couldn’t grasp at present, she felt a tiny leap of triumph. _Just where I needed to be._ She frowned, all the same. _But—why?_

The conjurer studied her carefully. A woman nearing her middling years, she was broad of body, tawny, and scrutinized her strange patient with large, gold-flecked eyes. A stiff cotton robe, dyed in woad and sewn together with fine threaded leather, covered her from ankle to collar, and her hands were bare except for the stiff leather ringbands that handled her tools. “There are better ways to go about getting the attention of future employment, you know,” she continued, sensing the probing effect of Jyera’s unintentionally strong eye contact. “I can take you up to the Adders’ office, even. Just no more falling out of the sky like an omen, if you don’t mind?”

Jyera nodded, realizing that the effect of the conjury was wearing off, and a drone was re-entering her skull with bone-shaking regularity. “My thought otherwise is that you are just fine. You’ll be sore for a while, probably dizzy. Eat a little more frequently, for a while. I don’t recommend looking for work just yet; even one day of respite will help that heal over. No need to turn it into a great sodding mess over a few gil and some favours.”

“But—“

“No ‘buts’, young woman.” She sighed raggedly, signature of a string of too-long days. “If you can’t be made to follow good sense and stay near your bed, I suppose you can take a short walk through city centre. Get yourself familiar with the place. But go on any more escapades and I will _personally_ see to it that you’re brought back to me on the end of a Wailer’s lance. Understood?”

She had no counterargument for that. Jyera nodded, somewhat embarrassed. She was so sure it wasn’t a tree, but who could she ask who would know any differently? The story fit with the size of the salve on her head.

“Very well. I can’t guarantee anyone will be able to give you a tour, but have yourself a wander… provided you won’t injure yourself horribly in the process again.” Jyera nodded a few more times, and then the conjurer seemed satisfied, her tools packed. “Wait—just a moment—I would like to discharge you with something.” Jyera tilted her head inquisitively; the conjurer’s shoulders seemed to crawl at her gaze. _Too much, too much, maybe._

Sitting upright in the bed now, Jyera watched as the woman withdrew a band of cloth, kneaded it flat, and brought it closer to the treated spot on her head. “This ought to keep you from making too much of a mess of yourself in public.” Jyera was about to protest, loudly, when the conjurer surprised her with the length of fabric still left after carefully wrapping the salved side of her head, and knotted it gently into a ribbon at her temple. _A bandana!_

“Hm. I didn’t think it would be, with all that red hair on you already, but red is definitely your colour, young miss.” The conjurer beamed at her and offered her a glass to look into. Sure enough—a surprisingly dark, wine red bandana adorned her head with nothing to betray the sore spot underneath. “Are you sure I’m alright to go?”, Jyera asked, and the quietness of her own voice startled her a bit.

“If you’re feeling well enough to go, you may go. Ah, don’t let me forget—the Wailer who spotted you found this caught in the roots of that tree you fell out of. I trust you’ll wait until you are more up to scratch before you go waving it at any beasties,” the woman teased. “And call me Ondina. I have a funny feeling about you, adventurer, and if I’m going to have to stitch up your head again in the future, you ought to know who to call for.” Her smile was uncannily warm as she handed Jyera a shoulder satchel and a slightly heavy bundle. Jyera unfolded the broadcloth to find an iron hand scepter, looking a bit old and bruised, and an odd warmth tingled in the long bones of her arms. _That’s right. I’m a thaumaturge._ The thought fit a little strangely once she also withdrew from the satchel a heavy grimoire full of bizarre drawings, and caught an etched green pebble as it rolled out of the fabric, as well.

Jyera looked up at her caretaker, trying to speak her thanks; but Ondina simply bowed and bade her farewell with a professional wave of her hand. She thence turned toward the door of the dwelling and began to walk, slowly, her heart beating harder the nearer she drew to the open forest of Gridania.

 

~

She had to blink several times to adjust her eyesight, largely from her own tremendous surprise at how dark the woodland was. A deep and dusky emerald labyrinth was not what she had expected to see, and though she was unsure what was so peculiar about the way sunlight came through only in pinpricks at the soaring canopy, a confidence took root inside her. _Yes! This is just right._

_…Now what?_

 

~

Jyera spent the day wandering through the densely wooded town—she would not call it a city just now, unless towers could be trees, and why not, maybe—belatedly realizing she had nowhere to stay, a pithy weight of gil coin in her pockets, and a rumbling belly.

She was also substantially far off the path of her outset. Dull anxiety displaced her hunger as her eyes darted about the darkening wood for the footpath. “Where is it,” she whispered, aghast. A rustle in the greenery seemed to scold her for opening her mouth, and a profoundly disgruntled-looking mass of hair and claws sprung out of the shrub next to her.

She made the mistake of yelping and found herself fleeing from the pursuit of a dark and wild form in the falling dusk. Her breathing thinned into a panicked hiss of air through her chest as another dead end in the footpath stared back at her. She heard the ire of the thing she’d upset, and pleaded with her confusion to let her aether fly true. Jyera recalled a flame to the halo of the scepter in her hand and flung it the way a child flings skipping pebbles into a lake.

She missed.

Over an adjacent hedge, torchlight had started to appear, however, and in the brief flash of light that made it through to the ground in front of her she saw her pursuer scurry away into the brush—a marmot. She swallowed, humiliated. _Bested by a marmot._

“What was that just now, Commander?”

“Probably one of those kids from town. Half of them don’t have the sense not to go wandering off into the woods at night, and the other half don’t care. Ah—there.” A man’s figure gestured to where she was crouching. “At ease. We’re Gridania’s patrol force. Show yourself, if you please—are you lost?”

Jyera stood up, her face turned away with some embarrassment still scribbled all over it. “N-no. It just got—dark out while I was on the path. Which—which way back to the city?” A nod and a pointed arm later, she was shuffling back to civilization with a spare Wailer to escort.

~

“Like as not, the Adders will have something for you in the morning, if you’re looking to stay local a few more days.”

Jyera nodded, cozened. “You really ought to be more careful, though. The Twelveswood has been more and more upset at something lately. Reports of missing people, sightings of wights, and tame animals growing mad and attacking travelers are piling up in the letterboxes of Wailers, Godsquivers, and Adders all, anymore.”

The woman, a tall and willowy Elezen with a smart bobbed haircut, frowned. “I’ve even had families ask for guards to be posted at the gates to their farms, these last few months. Rumours are saying some sort of _cult_ has been having meetings on whatever open field space they can find. I’ve kicked grass-munching, babbling squatters off of Gridanian properties before plenty of times, but I’ll admit there’s something different about these ones.”

Jyera stayed silent, trying to absorb what that implied. “Anyway… not everything the Twin Adder does is spanking ne’er-do-wells. Chances are they’ll let you deliver some missives tomorrow in exchange for a bed and a bowl of something to eat tonight. You said you were a thaumaturge?”

Jyera nodded again, still unsure what it was she wanted to ask the woman. “You’re a good long way from the nearest trainers _I_ can think of… maybe plan on making a trip to Ul’dah, if you think you need to brush up. And… even if you don’t, maybe just avoid starting mysterious brush fires in the Twelveswood anyway?” She beamed from under her wooden halfmask, taking her leave of Jyera as they reached the porch of the Twin Adder headquarters.  

Mail delivery it was, she thought glumly as she spooned helpfuls of a fragrant stew into her mouth, later, in a sparse but comfortable room that overlooked the midline of the trees. She wondered what was bothering her so greatly when a strengthening in her transient headaches urged her to get to bed. A report for the Conjurer’s Guild, due by noon the next day. “Maybe I’ll… spend some time in conjury,” she mumbled to herself as she started to comb her hair out. The bandana-bandage could come off tomorrow, she recalled—although she thought she might wash and keep the accessory.

She liked red, almost as much as she did blue.

~

“Concentrate.”

With difficulty, Jyera obeyed. “You are aware of only two things, presently. You hear the sound of my voice. Now, listen—hear the movement of the water through these roots. Perish the idea that you cannot. Banish the corruption of anxiety from your mind.”

Jyera’s eyebrows knitted. The silence left behind at the fall of Ondina’s incantations had misled her before, and she could not tell if the susurration and drip she was beginning to notice lay in her imagination or her body only. There was just one way to tell.

Relaxing her shoulders, her eyes remaining tightly closed, Jyera nodded. _Attunement. At-one-ment._ She let her breath out like a breeze. This was the part of the exercise where anxiety usually jerked her out of trance, and she tried to keep her mind on—nothing. Just wind. Just the water in the plants that surrounded them, now as loud as a swollen river.

“Your hand.” The proverbial hand was given. The last several times they had tried this, it was the next moment that cost her a success.

“Remember. You are only the earth. You are only the wind and the water. Remember.” Fear almost cracked the heart of her trance, but was beaten by the immensity of the sensation that followed the words. The knife dug into her palm, the slicing edge almost a coldness, and she wrestled with the shock.

“Water.”

Her heartbeat slowed again. She was trembling, still too aware she’d been cut; but sure enough, the soothing whispers of water trails moving through the stalks of the flowers in which she sat returned her to the memory of the next and final step.

“ _Cure._ ”

The uncut hand grasped a whorl of ash twigs, braided into a crook scarcely larger than the palm that held it. Jyera drew her fingers through the loop of it, and, still shaking, moved the wreath gently to the site of the gash. She ignored the dampness forming on her knee; she’d gone a little slowly, and her blood had not matched her pace. Jyera let out another long breath, almost a whine. _Just like the water._

The tingle that sprouted at the edges of the cut, cool as spearmint, traveled deep into the cut to become radiant warmth. She now waited. “All right. You may open your eyes now.”

When she did, she saw the conjurer sitting across from her, beaming. “Smooth as the day of your birth,” she said warmly. “Nicely done.” Jyera looked at the site the knife had bitten, no longer able to tell where it had struck. In spite of herself, Jyera let out a delighted, incredulous _hah!_

“I can hardly believe I’ve only been teaching you for a little over a week. Do you do aught else with all that free time?” Ondina rose to her feet and invited Jyera to follow. They trod softly through the moss bloom and fragrant grass, back to the gate at Gridania. Jyera was quiet most of the way there.

“I tried my hand at botany?”, she offered. “Something just… makes me feel like practicing magic all the time.”

“Mmphm. So too for many of us at the Fane. The elementals have been increasingly restless. I have to say, it’s a rather unexpected and pleasant surprise to have another conjurer at hand, even a novice. What was it that made you decide to take up conjury, anyway? One look at you and I knew you were the thaumaturgical sort, so do forgive me for underestimating your sense for the art.”

Jyera looked skyward, thinking. Dusk was falling, and the moon was slowly coming into view, like one drop of sweet milk after another. There was something else, there, too, she realized, and immediately the serenity of her ritual lesson fled. At the hip of the moon was a pinpoint of light that for a shuddering few seconds burned cruel crimson. “I… thought it would be practical. You know, in case of—marmots.”

“ _Marmots_? Now I _know_ that that’s not what you’re preparing for. Tell me true—did the Adders set you up with us, or…?”

“No. But they also won’t let me take any work that falls outside city borders.” Jyera’s bones rattled, and even though she was looking straight in front of her once more, the unblinking glare of that fleeting blemish in the heavens refused to leave her mind.

“Odd. Is that why you haven’t made the trip out to Ul’dah—or is it the weather?” The woman grinned ear to ear. “I myself do like a dry heat.”

“It isn’t that. I just thought I should learn how to stitch myself back together before I left Gridania.” Ondina paused just as they were about to pass the little waterfall that ran through the greenest corridors of the city.

“They can teach you _that_ much in Ul’dah. I don’t doubt it now—you still can’t remember what you were doing before you wound up in my clinic.” Jyera gulped at that. _No, not at all. Why, is that important…?_ “I somehow don’t think you were picking flowers and happened to slip off a high branch. No, I think it’s quite clear.” Ondina’s words were not accusations. “It took me some time to piece it together, honestly. I ought to have noticed it immediately, but I really thought you were… never mind. Let me ask you another question.”

Of a small throng of people chattering amongst themselves at the base of the falls some yalms away, one of their number—an Elezen gentleman of many summers—had begun to observe the pair of conjurers. ”Go ahead…” Jyera found herself side-wise staring back at the man.

“Have you had any bizarre dreams lately?”

Jyera’s mind was blank. “…I don’t understand,” she mumbled. Her gaze stayed locked on the gentleman’s, and he seemed strangely aware of that; he bowed slightly and adjusted the hand that held a wooden grandstaff.

The elder conjurer only shrugged. “Ah… forgive me, then. It can’t have been what I thought. No need to worry about it, then. I do still mean what I said, however. You are a _very_ peculiar adventurer. If you are still looking for work—it’s a bit of a travel, but I have something in mind for you. Nothing glamorous.” Jyera found herself lightly bowing back to the man before turning her gaze back to her tutor, who had been oblivious to the wordless exchange.

“Yes, please. I wouldn’t mind getting a break from picking weeds out of the woods, no offense intended to botany.” When the work of the past several weeks had not been weed-picking, it was instead struggling to command a sputtering and amateurish fire against one of a few small and irritated creatures in the back-road brush.

“I was waiting for a delivery. To put it as shortly as possible, the Guild caught word of an Amdapori settlement unearthed on—if you can believe it!—the coast of a remote island out past Vylbrand. Seems to have been a temporary shelter only, but a few possible relics turned up that were of interest to our scholars of ancient conjury.”

They stopped in front of the comfortable entrance to the adventurers’ guild. “Limsa Lominsa is the city in that region, and everything of ambiguous ownership passes through its gates for inspection. They should have finished it by now, but no word. Maybe you will find some answers on the way there, if you will accept the trip.”

Answers, Jyera thought, were vital, and not forthcoming. She would not be happy pressing flowers and dressing scratches with Cure spells forever. “All right. I will do it. I can’t shake the feeling there was something I _had_ to come here to do, but perhaps it isn’t _here_ specifically. I’ll find your delivery. After that—“

“The hero’s journey,” Ondina interjected with a matronly smile.

“P-pardon?”

“Anywhere is a good place to start. Here—this is the slip containing our last communications, and a few extra gil to help you cover the travel costs. I recommend attuning with the aetheryte when you arrive—you seem like you could use them for travel without wearing yourself out too quickly.”

Jyera stared long at the coin and the staccato penmanship of the order letter. “I haven’t the faintest idea why, but everyone nowadays seems poised on the edges of their seats. Everything is holding its breath, even the woods themselves. It’s as if they’re expecting something immense is going to happen… So, now is as good a time as any to saunter into a new place and make your mark. We might need you to, soon—the gods only know.”

That evening, Jyera turned over the little green stone in her palms, over and over, wondering how to make sense of the speed at which her new life was going. _I fell out of a tree_ , she thought, _and in just under a moon everything is unfamiliar all over again._ She buried her face in her pillow, listening to the sweetly singing frogs and insects in the woods outside, her head aching.

~


	4. //..receive and transmit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a chance meeting, but not by chance

If Gridania had been a labyrinthine tangle of side paths and circles, Limsa Lominsa was almost certainly worse. That, surely, was saying something—the Shroud felt a hundred emerald years long, a labyrinthine tangle in which all paths looked just about the same, and the whispers of unwelcome things in the dim brush calling always.

It had been an opportunity of sorts, all the same. Jyera found herself troubled by an intoxicating sense of nostalgia as she turned the otherwise meaningless pages of her grimoire whenever she made camp. Whatever the diagrams and elaborate, artful anatomies written there described was totally lost on her, and yet in a sense independent of their semiotic value, they portrayed an eclectic logic that was proving indispensable in combat. Perhaps it was only meditative; yet Jyera had difficulty arguing with the results, leaving singed trails instead of shy embers when the wilderness crawled out of the everlasting, mossy darkness to challenge her. The diagrams that looked most like living bodies were marked in illuminated trails of dots and crosses; on musing about this during a cast of flames, she felt as if the fire condensed along the silhouette of her own body. She felt blizzards in her bones; lightning in her heartbeat; flames, brilliant bonfires, in her joints and fingertips and toes.

All told, the Jyera that passed through Limsa’s towering main gates felt a more competent one than the stumbling adventurer who had left Gridania with nothing but the clothes on her back and the bag at her shoulder. The city itself, in its massive scale and belligerent resistance to the fear of heights, sprawled in ways that the woodland hadn’t seemed to. Jyera found herself missing the trees, as full of shuddering, sentient danger they had been.

She took slow steps along the greyscale limestone street, dizzy with the flow of busy people. The sprawl of smooth-paved walkways and lacquered wooden planks hoisted by industrial steel chains would have been palatial and magnificent had they belonged to something indoors; as fixtures of open port air, they felt instead like long stretches of a skyward obstacle course, only with the shove of foot traffic to keep the bands of bodies moving.

It was therefore a stroke of good fortune for which she was immensely grateful that a passing guard pointed her in the direction of her nearest destination. “Yer in luck, an’ landed not too far off it. Ye’ll be looking up the path there and int’er the office. Scholarlies’ll see ye right.” A churlish mountain of a man, with a greataxe to match sheathed at his back, he was nonetheless polite, and with a curt nod he waved her off to meet the Assessors of Melveaan’s Gate.

Jyera was surprised at her own impatience when, nearly a full bell later, the attendants at the only open counter were still chatting about their own business as they handled streams of sheafs of parchment and chests of imported goods.

~

 

“Hmph! As if that weren’t news enough, now they’re even saying adventurers working for the Maelstrom are being _accosted_ by some rambling poet in possession of an Assessor’s staff! I’ve heard rumours the mad bugger’s even using foreign, unseemly magics. We really _must_ be living in the end times…”

Jyera made a soft throat-clearing sound out of sheer anxiety. The woman manning the parcel retrieval station whipped her head to face the noise, then gestured something implying the wait would soon be over. At length, the chatter faded back to boredom, and Jyera emerged from the cluttered Assessors’ Guild with the news that a courier was now on her way to the Shroud, and would update over linkpearl on her arrival.

Now, Jyera sat perched on an outcropping on one of the city’s upper decks, contemplatively chewing on a sort of Lominsan fish pastry that tasted like butter, rosemary, and sea salt, and her irritation dissipated as the heat nurtured her hungry belly. She felt strangely out of stamina, hunger nonwithstanding, the magnetic sense of purpose stuttering in her head as she turned over the events in her mind. One of the clerks had spotted her idly turning the pages of the massive grimoire in her backpack and cast nervous grimaces at it; when Jyera looked up at the sudden pause in conversation, the woman frantically turned away muttering something about ‘no new students’.

“Mayhap ye’ll find work if ye pay the Admiral’s lackeys a visit,” a passing labourer said to his exhausted counterpart. “Maelstrom’s got in the habit of hiring empty-headed adventurers; might be ye bring something better than they’ve got.”

“On’y if they want their boots shined and windaes scrubbed…” the slouching man groaned. “Then again, ‘venturer types probably think themselves above it.”

When they were out of earshot, Jyera washed down the pastry with a long draught of orange juice, a new plan in mind.

~

 

The push and shove of bodies thinned out into an amber-hued austerity as Jyera nudged her way through the Lominsan crowds, up to the pennant-spattered Maelstrom headquarters. The lattice of flags, red and severe black, bearing the sigils of ancient warships, somehow stood out against the salt-crusted affability of the rest of the city, and they seemed to glow in their own fabric accord. A tingle worked its way up the peach fuzz of Jyera’s forearms to the crown of her forehead, for as the sun began to shrink from the clouds, the wind coming off the sea grew colder; the polished wood of the planks beneath her called the honey-yellow warmth of lantern light to its surface. She felt smaller and stranger than before. The soles of her suede gaiters clicked too loudly on the floor’s warm glow, but forward she strode, as if only following some far-off melody.

The attendant at the counter was frowning heavily, shifting a clipped sheaf of stamped papers further down a trail of limited desk space, scratching at a roll of blank vellum with the pace of one who simply could not write as fast as he could think. He registered her arrival a few moments later, looking irritated. “What’s this? Another adventurer type…?” The man, a young Hyur with tired, mousy-brown eyes and short cropped hair that only just obeyed the gravity imposed by his feathered cap, looked her over with a short series of glances. “Here about working for the Maelstrom? Aye, thought as much. You’re in luck—at present we’ve as much need for as many of your ilk as we can possibly pay. Forgive me for cutting direct to the point, recruit, but at present our greatest priority is a mission we’ve technically already hired out.”

Jyera’s brows came together in another skeptical stare. “Then—why preface it so—“

“Because we did not account for the sudden uptick in begoggled madmen with sticks shouting grotesqueries at our employees and conjuring up beasts for them to stave off. As such, what would have been a key development in our egress against the Imperials has potentially turned into a death sentence for our best new recruits _and_ risks exposing our intentions to the Garleans camped out all over Vylbrand,” the man heaved out in nary a full breath. “If you don’t mind skipping the formalities—here, take my pen, for hells’ sakes, as proof—if work is what you are looking for, and you are prepared to leave _this instant_ , I implore you. Go after our little band of misfits and secure the success of their mission. And _do not blow our cover._ They were headed up the Eastern coast to accost an imperial squadron before it made passage through the canyon that connects upper La Noscea with the highlands. If you hurry, you might catch up to our unit before they cross swords with the bastards.”

Jyera found herself breathless. This was not a postal route any longer. Something old and too well-practiced stirred awake in her spine; this, she was ready for. “I’ll do it—they will be back here before you know it! Oh, thank you, thank you!” She caught herself leaping as she turned heel and barreled into a run, her feet carrying her nigh to flight speed, the Storm official’s quill tucked into her braid like a nobleman’s bonnet. The jagged emerald she carried with her cramped her palms as she squeezed it, whether for luck or for some lost sensibility.

 

~

 

Imperial steel _stung_ , Jyera concluded, her torn shoulder dragging along behind her unharmed one. Her attacker did not live to gloat landing the hit for long; the ice she called around her had repelled him and sent him straight into the shield bash that silenced him. The white mage—she stood above the rank of conjurer, Jyera was somehow sure—knelt by her side, easing the bubble-bath warmth of healing magic into her frayed tendons.

“Thank you for coming to help us,” the woman murmured, a tiny smile on her Lalafellin face. “I thought they had us pincered for sure until I saw your fires coming up behind them.” When the magic had woven her muscles back into place and squeezed its handiwork taut, the woman gave Jyera a grateful nod and invited her to return with her party. “He won’t mind sharing a saddle with our hero, I promise you,” the healer added of their axe-bearing headman, with a giggle that reminded Jyera somehow of warm milk. She found herself wishing she could ride back on her bird instead of the warrior’s.

Having thought as much, however, was unimportant in the end. She fell deeply asleep with her head on the axe’s cool leather-bound scabbard not half a bell after the group turned for the city.

 

~

 

“Well done, recruits,” the attendant beamed, and Jyera was pleasantly surprised that he nodded to her also. Guincum, she had just learned, was his proper name; when she returned the quill to him, he quickly scratched it onto a scrap of paper indicating she was to be paid in equal measure with the band she had assisted. “Your bravery has ensured our realm another measure of security. I doubt the Garleans will try to make ingress at that site again anytime soon. Now—what was it you said your team recovered from them…?”

It was the white mage who answered, standing on the tips of her toes to place a peculiar lump of metal and cord on the countertop. “This was on one of their soldiers’ person. Can you tell us what it is?”

Guincum eyed the dun object suspiciously. “…This is a magitek receiver—and intact! Problem being, they’re oft designed to explode once too far afield of their masters… This one must be defective.” He looked astounded, and still anxious of the thing. “I must inform the Garlond Ironworks immediately—!“ He fumbled for the linkpearl tucked in the fabric of his hat, muttering excitedly into it as the band of adventurers breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“I _hope_ it’s defective,” Jyera mumbled, but what tugged at her bones was the name. Garlond. There was something about that name, and though the truth of it withdrew further into the fog of her brain the more she pored for it, she found herself as wound up to hear the results of the linkpearl conversation as any of those present.

Guincum was not long on the pearl. He turned to the remaining party members with a blustering mix of excitement and anguish. “The engineer I spoke with just now believes the Ironworks may be able to use that receiver to translate imperial code. Unfortunately—their cryptographer is presently occupied in the eastern lowlands of Coerthas, and we have no time to await his return. Therefore—“

“…Delivery?”

Guincum blinked twice at the disappointment in her voice.

“Don’t you worry, Ms. Jyera. We’ll go together; I can travel by aetheryte with you, if you’re not too tired.” The white mage gave her a serene bow. Jyera nodded, her hands weaving excited shapes in the air. _I’m not. I’m not tired at all. I feel like I could do this again and again…_

~

 

Disappointed by the gruffness of her exchanges with the engineers at the encampment, Jyera dipped into the rest of her day’s reserves and took the aetherial route back to the city. She was, she declared, due a solid rest after all. It would be some more time before the engineers rendezvoused at the Mizzenmast, and she could afford a refresh.

 

It was evening again when Jyera realized it was time to hand in her report.  

 

~

 

“I was wondering when you would arrive,” Guincum assured her with a nod. “The Garlond Ironworks have already sent a report on their findings; deciphering the exchanges recorded on that receiver have revealed that the Empire has begun establishing bases of operation in two underground complexes—Dzemael Darkhold in Coerthas, and Toto-Rak, in the Shroud—and that Maelstrom suspicions about the attacks we had the adventurers divert were correct. The assaults—one of which you were present for, of course—were only a feint… Ah, I’ve said too much—fine work, recruit…” Guincum signed off on the envelope with her pay enclosed, and trailed off, turning toward the next task on the sprawling wall diagram.

It was the sound of a procession of heavy booted footfalls and the rattling clink of armor that caught her attention. A small squad of Yellow Jackets and the distinctive, gangly frame of the engineer from the camp came into view. She watched them largely from the corners of her eyes, shifting her body only when the elezen stopped to speak.

 

“Master Garlond.”

 

Jyera’s heartbeat spiked. _Garlond Ironworks. ‘Master’ Garlond._

It was then she saw who the militiamen had surrounded, for they, too, paused their strides, arms lowered from where they had perched contemplatively upon their owner’s chin.   A man—a _young_ man—broad-shouldered and reaching above middling height, and strong of body, looked back toward the sound of his name. Jyera could not see much more of him, but caught the silhouette of a white jacket and smith’s clothing—and a wave of long, white hair. She froze.

 

“While my team’s initial readings were inconclusive, when combined with recent Maelstrom reports… there is no mistaking it, sir.”

 

One of the arms rose to his chin, when they were a few paces closer, and now she could see his face, lost in uncomfortable thought as it was.

 

“Your hypothesis has become irrefutable.”

 

Jyera felt her heart shrink into a shuddering, fluttering contraption deep in the yawning space between her ribs. Something urgent, so urgent. Something too much for her to suppress a tremor.

The man—‘Master Garlond’—ground his jaw into the crux of his fingers. His proud forehead was cinched above the bridge of a long, straight nose, in a look that was nearly pain. He then jerked his head up, and Jyera saw shocking blue eyes widen in recognition.

 

In a voice she thought unexpectedly deep for his affect, a timbre like scorched velvet, he concluded.

 

“Meteor…”

 

She watched them both retreat, her heart a distant palpitation in the pit of a marble statue, her nerves an electrocuted stun. She watched _him_ , until not even the shadow of a single silver strand of his hair fell upon the lamp-lit floorboards.

 

 

~~~

 

           


	5. ://. da capo

_“Ohoho, a petition from young Cid Garlond? A strange boy, that one, but his heart is pure, and his intentions straight and true.”_

_A strange boy._

Jyera squirmed to put muscle into her attempts to pry apart the legs of the diremite corpse that trapped her. One barbed-hair leg at last made a nauseating _crunch_ , followed by the snap of breaking it in twain. Jyera wrenched herself out of the rigid remaining legs, twisting at all angles to avoid getting any more sticky venom on her robe. She succeeded with an undignified slump to the cavern floor. “I… I officially hate Toto-Rak,” she groaned into the dimness.

_Strange is right._

She stood up slowly, trying not to get web or venom or knifelike purple hairs in her eyes as she rubbed at her dizzy head. A pair of moogles had seen to her companions, the accursed urn now out of her hands.

_“Kupopopo… if an elemental with that much anger finds itself in an area as thoroughly soaked in woodsin as this one, it will attack everything in sight until its life force is spent, kupo…_

_Since that ‘everything’ includes you, I would suggest proceeding with all haste to the exit, kupo!”_

The problem, of course, was that the freshly-felled giant arachnid had stiffened suddenly in death, leaving her wrestling with its coiled-up legs. She was still sour that it had not been in the interest of time for her to be the one to deliver the burned-out magitek scrap to the proper place.

~

 

After a haughty exchange with the guard posted at the entrance to the fetid dungeon, she was glad to find herself alone in the sleepy emerald haze of the Twelveswood.

The thick moss carpet of the woods cushioned her footsteps, and Jyera found her mind wandering off to the memory of the petition itself. A stiff paper, folded into its own envelope, addressed to the Gridanian authorities, she had turned it over and over in her hands, amazed by the lightness of the material. She had even been nosy enough to lean, too conspicuously, over the edge of the unfolded missive as the old conjurer at the entrance to the dungeon read it over. It was written in a stern, but elegant hand, thin spikes of black ink applied at feather-lightness. _No waste of materials,_ she had surmised. She had even reached out to lay her fingertips on the toothy surface of the paper, as if unaware that it was still being held by its reader. Looking at the penmanship made her feel nostalgic. It lent itself well to the blunt, but cultured diction of the content, and a wave of warmth passed over her. She felt as if she had read that handwriting all her brief life.

_“A strange boy, but his heart is pure, and his intentions straight and true.”_

_What, then,_ were _they?_

The question recurred at the pace of the shifting tides, befitting the long trip back to Vylbrand.

~

~

~

 

“What can you tell me about something called ‘Meteor’?”

The archer across from Jyera met her question with her eyebrows askance and a mouthful of rice, which she quickly swallowed. “Eh?”

“’Meteor.’ It was something I heard when I turned in our mission report the other night.” Jyera was staring intently at her interlocutor, a fixed expression of which she was superbly unaware.

Taking another bite out of her bowl and chewing thoughtfully for a moment before replying, the archer only shook her head slowly. “Ask Long-ears behind me. All I know’s that there was some kind of black magicks as used to be called that.” She gestured to the elezen seated at an adjoining table, a tower’s shadow of a man who almost never spoke, and more rarely still ever left his face unshrouded.

“That there was,” he murmured, an aristocratic drawl betraying his Ishgardian upbringing. “But ‘tis of sparing relevance here, I think. Though you carry around that cloak and cudgel, your discipline could only broadly be conceived as thaumaturgy. That you additionally had no knowledge of the homonymous black magicks only furthers that impression. Nay, I daresay you’ve caught word of something very specifically _else_.” Jyera flinched. He was not wrong; what she felt herself casting when she took to shaping aether turned out to be precisely taboo in orthodox thaumaturgy—so much so, that it added a little thrill of deviance to the sensation of her magic. She would not have ventured to guess ‘Meteor’ was magic, indeed. Gathering herself, she reintroduced the question.

“What could it be, then? It sounded urgent, and yet only those two eng—“

“If it’s _urgent_ , then it is classified Maelstrom business and not for your ears, however plaintively concerned they were when you overheard it,” he interjected. “That said, I wager your next statement regarded engineers, and you are in luck.” He nodded to the archer, who set her bowl down on the dark, lacquered surface of the inn table. She rummaged through her quiver and withdrew a slip of paper, its wax seal sprung away at an angle after opening, like a stuck tongue.

“Those Ironworks blokes got a huge commission for the Maelstrom. They’re supposedly going to build a flagship, but with one of those _weird_ engines stuck in it that the airships have.”

An electric flutter passed through Jyera’s ears, and she was suddenly, utterly engaged with the miqo’te’s proposition.

“Problem is… the only part we don’t have is that blue stuff. Ceruleum, yeah. Guincum told us there’s a deposit somewhere in northern Thanalan, but that means importing it, and…” She hardly needed to make the coin-rubbing gesture she was giving Jyera now; Jyera’s immediate thought was how long the reagent would have languished in the Assessors’ hands before it ever made it to the engineers, expenses nonwithstanding.

“So—and if you ask me, this is a _horrible idea_ and they should never have done it—they asked one of the pirate crews who’s only just gotten friendly with the Admiral’s rules to go make some noise out in Vesper Bay, a couple of stones’ throws out from the dig site, and they’re hoping to, well, you know…”

Jyera, who did not know, tilted her head at an ever deeper angle.

“… _Avoid the tariffs_ , if you catch my meaning.”

“They’re planning on _stealing_ it?”, she squawked, and her companions gestured furiously for her to be silent. More quietly, she added, “How is this acceptable to Maelstrom command? We cannot just _take_ from fellow Eorzeans—“

“They don’t see them as all that fellow. I know you couldn’t make it to their respective fanfares, but all three of the big city-states are high on pride, we found. This is probably all the competition Limsa believes the Ul’dahns deserve.” She shrugged, her sharp golden eyes tracking back to her unfinished meal. “But if you wanted to, you could do this part. All you would need to do is follow them around a little, pretend to be helpful, find the stuff, and report back here. Oh, and maybe don’t get killed if you run into the local authorities on the way…”

Jyera blinked at the text of the missive. Her companion had had it memorized, verbatim, and she was rather amazed about it. She looked up, trying to find an expression that fit for her mixed gratitude and confusion, and was answered with an amicable shrug of humility. “Figured it might put you in line of those Ironworks folks again, and since it was their blabbermouths that got you into this ‘Meteor’ tizzy, maybe you’ll be able to get the truth out of them and be on with it.”

Jyera, who was still inexplicably lost for words, ran to the counter of the inn kitchen and ordered her companion a third helping.

 

~

 

She all but rolled off the ferry as it docked in Vesper Bay, a seasick headache sprouting into an acute _crunch_ as the little vessel rollicked itself steady. Wearily, two things occurred to her; one, that she was either late or just in the nick of time, as a heap of contused Flames soldiers littered the dirt walkways between buildings. The second, that she would swear on her own skin that this place was far smaller than it should be. Somewhere in the muddy depths of her memories, fleeting impressions of a white-clay and sandstone façade stirred; of sidewalks, stepping stones, and statuary. Vesper Bay as it was before her now was all of two shack-like storehouses, a tent, and the early scaffolding of a proper dock.

And, of course, a squadron of bruised soldiers snoozing in the dirt, at their posts, and tangled among their fishing nets.

Jyera silently cursed the squeak of her taut leather shoes as she took careful, tiny steps into the clearing. Before she found any conscious individuals, a sharp and hoarse voice bit into her ears.

“You the scrag they sent to collect the ‘lum?”

She snapped to attention, standing up far too straight. “Wha—a-aye, that’s me, yes. Ma’am! Er—“

“Well, don’t just _stand_ there scratchin’ your buttocks!” She was quickly prodded along in the direction of the request at the (mercifully) smooth pommel of a marauder’s axe. “Cap’n’s up at the ‘lum pits by now, fillin’ up his pockets. Best hurry up if you mean to join him, yeah? Now _off_ an’ do it!”

Jyera was in no mood to complain, realizing bitterly too late that it might have behooved her to wear something a little more… ‘piratey’. The heavy tome in her knapsack, she nevertheless conceded, would have flagged her in the end.

Thanalan, now—perhaps there had been merit to the idea of staying in Ul’dah a while. The air flowed evenly in a dry heat, a breeze off the distant sea ruffling the hem of her cowl. Red rock, copper sand, and pale, igneous earth spread out in plateaus, peaks, and valleys as if sculpted, through haft and hand, by a thoughtful stonemason. The land was not all desert, either; though much of the ground beneath her feet was packed dirt and drifting sediment overtop, the flourish of shrubs and short, prickly trees, and the swathes of river grass painted along the dips of some of the hills, the land was nurtured well by the rush of a vast floodplain. Jyera was briefly stopped in her tracks. For a moment, there had been a whisper in her mind’s eye of a time before this, crouched low on her belly on the feathery back of a chocobo. She had to pause her footsteps to see the rest of the memory; the heavy bounce and sway of the animal’s powerful legs, the saddlecloth drumming in her chest, tired hands wrapped around the reins. The vision abruptly faded, leaving her with another of the particularly dizzying headaches that accompanied her recollections. She shook herself head-to-toe to dispel its remnants, and marched toward her destination with a much hastier pace than before.

 

~

 

“’ _Poxy-arsed?_ ” she hooted, incredulously, but her umbrage was easily drowned out under the stream of worsening taunts between the Maelstrom crew and the arriving Flames contingent. _Did I give something away…?_

“And we call the _Amal’jaa_ beasts,” the Flame corporal retorted, sneering. The miqo’te at Jyera’s side withdrew her greataxe and stood, feet apart, with it glaring out in front of her.

“Why ain’t we gutted you yet…” she hissed, and reflexively Jyera scrambled for her cudgel and the little chunk of green crystal that, if nothing else, lent her a feeling of competence. She was newly and acutely aware of the spine of the tome she carried as it dug into her back. That it had come to fighting in the end after all made her curse terribly to herself, but she felt the finer hairs of her neck and eyebrows begin to stand on end as the charge poured through her anyway. She was a pace and a half behind the rest of her group when they leapt to the fore of attack.

With a jolt sparking up the bones of her skull, Jyera, too, made ready to cast as she stumbled forward. The shivery, coiling sensation of brewing lightning had just about reached into her palms when time yet again slammed closed to a halt.

“ _Stop!_ ”

Jyera saw, heard, and felt nothing but the fleshy hammer of her heartbeat. It was the cry of _that_ voice. In forceful emphasis, it was like a shot fired from a powder musket—harsh, almost a boom, but scattered through the punch of its airy exhale and warm with the kindling inside it. When the world drunkenly spun back into view, she realized her hands were trembling and her knees limp.

“Stay your blades! There is no need for bloodshed!”

Jyera looked up, so slowly she thought she might have slipped out of the reach of time, and found the owner of that cry.

“Ceruleum is a highly unstable source of energy. One errant ember from a Fire spell…” Her hands twitched uncomfortably, guiltily. “…I imagine you can piece together the rest.” Somewhere, she recalled that it was catastrophically flammable, and now the prospect that there might have been a skirmish was wholly nauseating to conceive.

“--but now it appears that something is bending the force—drawing it away.” Jyera had to admit, for a pack of seafaring pit fighters, the crew around her were at least letting the apparition speak. He was the same man, it clicked together in her head, that had wandered through Maelstrom command that evening, and through many of her dreams every night since. Time was moving again for her.

“It is why the weather has become unpredictable, why creatures have grown large and fierce, why crystals are losing their aspect.” She stared at him openly as he continued to speak. His gaze was stern even as he turned it skyward, the light of the coming dusk casting pearly shadows on his neck and collarbones. Her pulse rose a little, again, and though she hoped it was not overt, she observed that her breathing pushed strongly against the inside surface of her ribs.

“…Bloody scholarlies. Back to the ship, b’fore the bookish bastard bores us all to death.” The man sheathed his axe, and before Jyera could so much as fake an “aye, cap’n”, the whole crew dashed off down the hill behind the hulking rocky outcropping that surrounded the dig site. Indignantly, the Flames hurried after them, and as they loped past him Jyera saw the man with the long, white hair loosen his shoulders and cross his arms, sighing in defeat.

Jyera made to stand up straighter, the feelings of faintness dissipating. As if she had forgotten she was physically in his presence, she took a backstep out of pure shock when the man spoke to her directly.

“I take it you, too, are of the Maelstrom.” Recovering, she stood stiffly and searched his face. A gracile jawline; a long, straight nose, cut wide and angled. Wide shouldered, powerfully built, and dressed in smithy’s leather, save the large brass pendant lying on his breast, and the most peculiar set of blue crystal eyewear perched across his forehead. The man’s moon-pale locks were also, she realized, a bit wild; some swept aside at rebellious angles and stuck out where they oughtn’t, even though as far as she could tell, the rest were combed through. But those stern, serious eyes, she thought. They were the feature that struck her through like she’d been cut. They were not cruel; only fierce, chilling in their urgency.

She answered with a nod, neither blinking nor looking away.

“…Though, I do not think you share aught else with the dull-witted brutes who but recently took their leave of us.” She was unsure how to respond to that, and so maintained her stance, though she allowed it to soften some.

“…Who _are_ you?”, she murmured, “And why—how did you come to be here, right at that moment?”

He studied her in turn, the pierce of his eyes shifting from intense expectation into even assessment. “The questions of an inquiring mind, to be sure.” His eyes drifted across her frame. She was slowly filtering through the statements he had made while she was swooning at the cusp of faintness. The red moon. Strange aether currents. She wondered, then, if she seemed to him another irregularity, something alien. He would not be entirely wrong for thinking it, she mused. Her recollection broke apart around the question she next blurted out with next to no hesitation.

 

“…what is ‘Meteor’?”

 

It was microscopically evident, but she saw him flinch. Hard. “…Very well. I shall reveal all.” She moved as if to follow that, her arm lightly raised; “…But not here.” She stood with her mouth stuck on open, the shape of an aborted remark, and he went on. “Meet me at the airship landing in Limsa Lominsa, atop the Mizzenmast.”

She exhaled at last as he began to walk away from her, a sight that provoked strange disappointment inside her. “Oh—“ He then paused, leaning toward her direction. “And come alone. The subsequent exposition will seem _far_ more dramatic if you do.”

Jyera balked. She was still fumbling with whether or not that was intended to be funny on his part when he was quite out of view. _The_ godsdamned _nerve of—! What_ are _you, Master Garlond?_

All the journey home, she was by turns absolutely furious, and totally unable to suppress a flurry of bewildered giggles.

 

~


	6. /..|| chiaruscuro

Jyera had opted to take the ferry to Limsa Lominsa, finding her energy strangely depleted. The vessel dragged across the water for what felt like an age, and amidst the tangle of her emotions, she had had time to lie on her back on the deck, watching the night sky bleed over daylight like mixed paint.

His words echoed in her head, and she hazily did her best to interpret them as she searched the sparse cloud cover for a glimpse of the moons.

_Have you not looked up into the sky and noticed something amiss?_

She thought of the moment of fear that closed around her lungs, the night in Gridania where something in the sliver between canopies had been _wrong_. She searched for it now, her eyes wandering back and forth along the heavens as though each were a steady violet metronome. The moon she knew—the giant silver cistern into which bright milk was ever-pouring—gazed back at her within easy view.

The moon she did _not_ know bored a fiery puncture through the curtain of stars, a wound no larger than the head of a pin; and yet, through the shorn skin of the night, an ancient foreboding glared at her for snooping.

_Have you not seen it swell like a tumor? Redden like the gout?_

Only, the last time it had seen her—and she was becoming more sure that it was not the other way round—it had been nearly a trick of the eye. The lesser moon _did_ change. She sealed her eyes shut to break contact with it, rolling over on her side.

The sound of footsteps on the boards of the little ship stirred her out of another frustrated giggle—what high bird had he rode in on, anyway, to ask her to make their meeting more _dramatic_ —and a sudden shiver rode up her spine, bony arch by bony arch. She rolled back over and sat up swiftly, searching for the body that had so casually approached her, and found she had to look up to see its face.

An elezen man, his face concealed in a muslin hood, and marked besides with peculiar, yet strangely familiar tattoos, regarded her coolly as her brows pinched into a suspicious frown. Darting her eyes over his shoulder, she spotted it; the cumbersome musket of an Assessor, its pipes coiled at the back of the man’s neck. Jyera swallowed, and braced herself for a confrontation.

“ _Ne’er till land consumes sun can sea bear moons. Heavens spew crimson flame; hells seep black dooms_.” It was his only greeting, spoken quietly, in an indecipherable timbre.

“I beg your _pardon_?”, Jyera blurted out, before her better senses could step in.

“These are the words of Mezaya Thousand Eyes. A shadow hangeth over the realm. Have you the courage to face it…?” he continued, Jyera’s ears hitching over the unusual dialect as he spoke.

She must have been too long in responding, for the man began to tilt his head in a gesture of doubt. After a few silent moments, he spoke again, softer this time.

“Pray forgive me. I fear I mistook thee for another. Yet know that if thou desire the dawn, thou must needs heed mine oration.” Without further niceties, the man began to turn away from her, only calling back over his shoulder. “The Empire now moveth in full force. Dusk draweth ever closer. Hearken thee to the light…lest thee and thine be entombed in umbral ash.”

Jyera slept only about a bell’s worth of fitful nap when the ferryboat pulled up to the city dock with a drunken rollicking and sloughed her off her bench.

~

J’rhoomale leapt out of her seat, at their usual spot in the decidedly crudely-named tavern a ways up the Mizzenmast. “Jyera! Thank the gods you’re back! We all got worried sick when we heard about the pir—“

“ _Shush_ , cat-for-brains, it’s bad enough for the Maelstrom that it happened at all, let alone to speak of it out loud in public,” the knight of the group interjected gruffly. “But go on, skipping that bit.”

The archer frowned at him for being a poor sport, and returned her attention to Jyera, hailing one of the workers to bring out something for Jyera to drink as she did. “ _An-y-way_ , what ended up happening? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“I feel a little bit like I have,” Jyera answered anxiously. “But otherwise, not much more than you probably heard. But technically…” She looked nervously down to the floor, wringing a loop of russet hair around her finger.

“Technically _what_?”

“ _Technically_ , we didn’t succeed at finishing the job… I’m—I’m sorry. There were Flames, and everyone was about to start fighting, and then—“ She stopped herself, the reminder hijacking her pulse for a moment. “—and then everyone ran off. There was no way I could have gotten the ceruleum out of there without anyone knowing on my own.”

The collective groaning from her companions was somehow worse than the lack of sleep.

“Oh! Actually, I might not be done—it’s—well—I have to speak with someone from the Ironworks about it. I might be about to find out what ‘Meteor’ is, too.”

A resigned sigh floated up from under the brim of the sorcerer’s wide hat. “Well, go about it, then. Dare I ask who it was that asked for you—or worse— _why_ they asked for you at all?”

“Nailleberte, go easy on her. We’ve been doing this kind of work for longer than she has,” J’rhoomale retorted. “But now you’ve got me curious, too, damn it!” She beamed, her lightly exaggerated canines shimmering in her smile.

“Master Garlond turned up right as we were about to get into a skirmish, and from what he was saying, I am glad he did… or I might have gotten sent back to you in a clay pot.”

That earned her a series of perplexed expressions—and from Nailleberte, sustained silence. “Isn’t that—the owner, president guy?”, J’hroomale replied, her tone skeptical. “What in hells was he doing out _there_?”

“Apparently, I’m about to find out…”

~

The path to the airship landing was fairly straightforward, inasmuch as a spiral staircase and a tall, austere lift could be. Everywhere along the way, Jyera heard animated murmurs from Storm staff and civilians alike. Whoever he was, Jyera mused uncomfortably, it seemed newsworthy that he was here. She found her heartbeats picking up their paces as the lift rolled up to the top of the Mizzenmast. The bite of the pulley locking into place told her she had arrived.

As if in slow motion, her toes wading through and against the full weight of gravity, she stepped closer to the platform where a particularly vibrant airship sat docked for repairs. Her eyes then fell upon him.

He was crouched in front of the large wing joint, feeling around with his ungloved hand until his fingertips found their target—a hairline fracture Jyera could see even from where she stood—at which he smirked, satisfied. _Gotcha_ , she thought ought to be the name for that expression. He then shook his head in a gesture of resignation and stood up, turning to face her.

The look he gave her was serious and, she thought, difficult to read. “I have been waiting. And I must admit, it is not something I do well.” He folded his arms as he spoke. His voice gave her shivers anew, so dark and deep coming from such a young face.

She opened her mouth to protest, all the same, at the belligerence of his greeting, when he continued, “Let us make this brief. You asked what I was doing out there. Well; I was studying current of the aether moving through the ceruleum deposits there, as they traveled back to Silvertear Lake.”

That remark gave her pause. Where had she heard this before, of the flow of aether passing through the open channels of the world, like blood through living flesh? The mild alarm must have registered unchecked in her expression, for he chose his next words more carefully.

“As I _attempted_ to explain to those brutes at the gorge—I believe something is disrupting the natural flux of all energy in the land. An external force. My studies point to Dalamud, the lesser moon, as the most likely suspect.”

Mystified, Jyera interrupted him. “How do you know that…? What made you suppose it’s the lesser moon?”

Suddenly, something dark crept across his eyes, though he buried it in his fixed expression. “Well… it is complicated. And really—does it matter—“

“Of bloody _course_ it matters!”, she said at an exasperated pitch that betrayed the hastening speed of her curiosity.

He seemed taken aback by that, one foot receding behind him. Recovering his wits, he urged her on in a much softer, gentler tone. “Time is of the essence, my friend. Garlemald has been aware of this for some time. It is why they have taken up positions all around Mor Dhona. And it is no mere invasion, though I wager it was once intended as one. No—what is beginning now is more sinister. Something— _more_.”

Jyera briefly recalled her only contact with the Garlean Empire—the skirmishers on her first job—and felt something disconnect. “…Who _are_ the Garleans, really? Are they more than just—brigands and skirmishers?”

His expression continued to soften in spite of the bite of her protests and the expensive nature of her ignorance on the matter. “Too much more. And I fear I am partly responsible… but never mind that.” The last part of his statement seemed to Jyera too hasty. He was not comfortable, and she saw the shadows scurry beneath the cover of the blue and silver of his eyes.

“Master Garlond…” He inclined his head just slightly, and it dawned on her that the bones of his face were crafted at angles that lay mesmerizingly under the flutter of the wild drifts of white on his head. “… what is ‘Meteor’?”

He swung himself into a full-body flinch, a tremor shaking his composure. “You could not—not possible.” She only regarded him with her fiercest gaze, the boldest posture she could muster.

There was silence in between them for an age.

“…Well, I shan’t be able to say you did not deliver on a dramatic entrance.” His face, from the bridge of his nose to the high angled corners of his eyes, to the taupe peak of his lips, still bore the same stern and almost cold position they had before, but his shoulders had relaxed, and he let his arms hang naturally at his hips. “Very well. But I’m afraid that is a conversation demanding even greater discretion than this one.”

Jyera straightened her back, the neutral dip of open wonder returning to her features. “You mean—you _will_ tell me?”

“Aye. I have elected to heed my instincts. It may not be the most scientific of methods, but I have oft found it to be the most reliable.” The chill withdrew from his eyes. “Else I greatly doubt I would reveal this much to you—an adventurer, of all classes of people.”

Jyera reached up to tighten the little cord that held her braid together, and moved closer to where he stood. She was not aware that she was staring now.

“Right, then. Follow me.” The leather of his boots and trousers crinkled as he turned his back and nodded to her to proceed. She was no longer feeling tired.


	7. /./_:: trusting in you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not what I think of as a full chapter, but close... too excited for the forthcoming.

“Where are we going, exactly?” Jyera dared whisper as they turned a corner into the next corridor. She would not have imagined the Mizzenmast so full of corridors, narrow as they were, and lined chiefly by Maelstrom barracks. The wood of some of its flooring was saturated with the sound of their shoes. Jyera’s, the soft tug and strain of her goathide shor’boots, the soles of which made conspicuous clicks; and advancing hers, there were Master Garlond’s, the murmuring rattle of the steel buckles in half-step with the strides of his heavy boots.

 

Still, he carried himself with what she was hard-pressed not to call an educated poise. Sturdy as he was, and his dress sturdier still, Master Garlond nevertheless walked like a nobleman.

 

Her observations were routed as they drifted past the entry to the lift, and russet carpeting swallowed their footfalls. “I have arranged a temporary lease on one of the barracks, further into the building,” he answered at length. “Well, more of a storeroom, but quite serviceable. We shall reach it soon—but I chose to take this route for a reason. The infirmary is in this wing, and it pains me to say that they rather have their hands full at present with those wounded in Garlean ambushes and rogue patrol units.” Jyera inhaled suddenly, an undignified _gulp_ that clawed its way down her neck.

 

“What of their healers…?”

“There’s only so much that can be patched up on the battlefield when ‘tis a juggernaut that lands the blow,” he replied in a bitter hush.

 

He kept his eyes forward with a stalwart grimace as the two of them strode past the open doorways of infirmary rooms. Jyera’s stomach shrank to the size of a pebble and sank to the very pit of her; broken men and women, some like ashen shades of themselves, some whose own limbs lay uneasily against their singed and tattered uniforms. Horrible, all horrible. She wrenched her eyes off of a silhouette in the back room, playing out in the shadows cast up against the wall, the skeletal specter of the windowpanes stretched uncomfortably over the struggle. Someone there was part-man, and part-machine—neither purposefully, nor willingly.

 

“All of this will be a fraction of the devastation if—if my current hypothesis holds. If Meteor succeeds.”

 

Jyera’s eyes drifted numbly off the carnage. She and her party had come away from their clashes with Garleans bearing no worse than a lanced shoulder—which she had to admit, would have quickly turned sour were it not for the gift of time and white magic. Speaking of sour; a bilious scent was crawling into her nostrils, and she found herself stifling her nose and mouth with the sleeve of her robe, ungracefully stumbling ahead of the stoic engineer. He did not chide her for it; when she looked ruefully over her shoulder at him, she found no worse than one shrewd, white eyebrow raised high above its ridge.

 

“Ah. Here.” He caught up to her with two longer strides of his powerful legs and gazed down at the wrought-iron contraption that sealed the double doors in front of him. He opened only the first of the two, nodding to her to follow.

 

Inside was hardly recognizable as a barracks. Tables had been shifted from their original places into adjoining desk spaces, converged at the corners of the high limestone walls and slatted wooden ceiling. Jyera walked past towers of folios and thick ledgers, sidled carefully past gemkeep’s microscopes and pinned specimens of what she thought might have been abnormal crystal, and teetered dangerously past the makeshift observatory that sat squarely on the dog-eared margins of an enormous map. “This is your office?” she ventured, unable to keep the flat note of disbelief out of her voice.

 

“Of a sort,” the engineer replied unhelpfully. “Not an official one, fitted for the president-owner of the Ironworks. Think of it as…” He trailed off, seeming to remember just then that he meant to jot something down before it was gone for good, and indeed he had started scrawling something in the messy blueprints laid out in front of him. “Bah—forgive me, I could not have let that slip my mind.”

 

Jyera peered unsubtly around his shoulder at the still-bloody ink drying on the page. Largely unintelligible and loaded with jargon and hurried brush strokes, the document still made the back of her head prickle. What she could make out corroborated their earlier exchanges—and to a lesser degree, the vague and ominous poetics of the vagrant who had approached her on the ferry.

 

“You asked me what Meteor was.”

 

She turned her eyes away from the schematic and found him looking out over the expanse of the map laid out over the central table of the room, his arms crossed and head somberly bowed.

 

“I’ve not the foggiest notion why I should tell you more than you already know about it—save perhaps that if your curiosity is sated, my work might continue without further ado.”

 

Jyera frowned deeply at that, her brows pressing an indignant furrow into the middle of her forehead.

 

“Meteor… a project of Garlean design. The ‘something more’ I spoke of at the landing… and my investigation into which I wish to keep as quiet as possible, hence the secrecy on my part.” Slowly his arms unfolded, and he leaned more prominently over the map’s surface, his broad hands gripped at the desk’s edge to support his weight. He had yet to look at her again, hard blue eyes fixed on the cluster of numerated labels up the north and east expanses of Thanalan’s corner of map. A white drape of some of the longer hair at the front of his face slid out of place, obscuring the teal glass of the strange goggles he wore over his forehead.

“Named for the eponymous sorcery of ancient Allag, said to tear stars from the heavens and summon them to land here. The imperials wished to mimic it through technology, to employ it as a weapon of war…”

 

She found herself walking the perimeter of the map, sifting the data points and tentative connections sketched on its surface into her memory, as he went on.

 

“But it would not be controlled so easily. Dalamud; that was its target. I suppose you could argue that it was successfully contacted, and yet…” A shudder he must have hoped was invisible scurried from his shoulder and down his spine. “Garlemald has no idea what it is doing. Dalamud responded—unforgettably. The night sky, an aurora of crimson, and a blinding column from the heavens to the seventh hell. There was nothing left of that city of thousands—no one and nothing—and still the Empire pursues Meteor doggedly for its ambitions. Only…” He straightened, a taciturn expression wiping away the pained one that preceded it. “Only now there’s an incongruity. The readings from the aetherial networks of this land no longer correlate with the movements of Garlean military units, hastening and increasing as they are. That, I’ve no answer for, and therefore most concerns me.” He gestured casually at the map as he turned his back to it, the gloved hand passing through his long hair as he moved toward another open ledger. “That is, however, not an aspect of the issue you need involve yourself wi—“

 

“Your diagram is wrong.” Jyera looked up as he whipped back around, meeting his eyes with a blunt, matter-of-fact expression.

 

“I—what? Begging your pardon, adventurer, but—“

 

She pressed the tip of an index finger into the tight cluster of recently-dated points in the northern Thanalan section of the map. “These. They’re the readings you took, aren’t they? Samples from a longer flow of aether?”

 

He stared at her, the tips of his gloved fingers still hanging onto his scalp, with a face that looked like it was doing a sod-up job of hiding how bewildered he was. “Aetherometric crystallography. Aye. How did—“ He strode over beside her like a man sleepwalking, and crouched over the charts, eyes sweeping it for mistakes. His sudden closeness caused a bloom of embarrassing warmth in her cheeks, and she shuffled uneasily, seating herself a few ilms away in the nearest chair. He was palming his mouth contemplatively when she went to explain.

 

“It’s just that I was thinking about what you said—that the source of the flow _should_ be up here, at Silvertear Lake—“ Her fingers gently drifted over the border to Mor Dhona. “But that now, no such thing is happening any longer. It’s being pulled… this cluster here links up with all the others. So why have you left Silvertear marked as the origin…?”

 

“Navigation,” he murmured absently, processing her statements.

 

Her hand had settled at last on a corner of Mor Dhona that hugged the western slopes of Thanalan as it swelled out to its coastline. “…So it’s been pulled more toward this way, a little south and west.”

 

He was silent almost too long, and just as she realized she’d been holding her breath, he let out a long exhale himself. “Bloody hells, you’re right. That puts the newest measures squarely in context—dammit, I can’t afford to miss something so large again.” He stood back and met her eyes with a more heated scrutiny than before. “How were you able to tell that?”

 

She tensed. “It’s just that it reminds me so much of the diagrams in my journal. I use it to prepare all my casting now in the field, and… here,” she paused, shrugging off the satchel at her back and flipping its leather mouth open to retrieve the tome. “There’s a different one on every page. I don’t know why they’re there, but I feel so much more focused and clear when I’m casting from memory if I study them. I’ve wondered before if they aren’t like an anatomical map of aether, if something like that were even possible.”

 

He leaned over the pages just enough to sweep an uneasy curiosity over them, and fell silent again. Jyera could almost hear the gears spinning in his brain. He stood up wordlessly and paced, slowly, as if to choose which thoughts to speak aloud.

 

“… Keep that journal hidden, if you can. Only for your own safety, I assure you. But I had a feeling I was sensing something out of the ordinary about you.”

 

She had difficulty restraining the urge to leap up from her seat at that.

 

“I’m… I’m afraid that that is all I can freely say at this juncture. I hope I have sufficiently addressed your question, and—ah, a moment.” He moved to a taller chest of drawers and withdrew a cord-bound stack of notes. “For your great trouble, and that of your comrades,” he said apologetically, turning over a signed leaflet of the notes—which turned out to be Storm seals—to her hands. “I realize you must have taken this mission with the promise of good payment once the naval project began, and that the loss of that contract now returns a pittance in exchange. Please accept these as my thanks for your risk, and your fine work.”

 

He was most of the way to the door, looking rather anxiously perturbed, when Jyera called out, “Wait—what are you doing with these—am I supposed to leave already?”

She cringed at herself almost as soon as she finished the question. Moving toward him, she stopped within arm’s length of the door and cast a confused and worried look at him. His expression was not unlike it, either. Regarding her carefully, he added a parting thought after a few moments with a suggestive nod. “…In a few days, expect requests from the local newsprinters on your Maelstrom roster. The postings will explain it. For now—truly—I must be away. I— _ahem_ —have much to consider after your discovery.” The look he wore was almost gentle now, even as it receded from view the more distance grew up between herself and the interior of his office. He inclined his head in a courteous bow and bid her farewell. As the heavy door gently sealed into place, Jyera’s mind was awash with new forebodings, and a fury of new questions that far outweighed the nagging burden of the old ones he had answered.

~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friendly disclaimer--if and when you see shades of canon 1.0 dialogue in this work, it is woven here as homage.


	8. :||:: the rook also watches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2 disclaimers: if and when you see 1.0 dialogue threaded into my prose, it's done as homage exclusively; and just for clarity, these adventurers aren't the WoD--just the WoLs of 1.0 that WoD were another world's version of. 
> 
> thank for reading <3

“…So tell me again why we’re doing this?” J’rhoomale groaned, squatting at the creekbed as she strained and rinsed the sinuous moleskin of its blood.  “How many damned moles were you planning on butchering today, exactly?”

Jyera shook water from her own hands and laid another skinned, cleaned carcass on the butchery paper next to her.  She had rolled up the sleeves of her undertunic, robes balled up and dry in her satchel, a few stones away from all the splashing. She held the handle of the knife askew to let the current push away the last of the animal viscera from its blade, and came up with a reply.

“Just an easy job to break up all the espionage and suicide missions,” she said with a casual shrug.  

“You’re a terrible liar, Jyera,” the archer retorted glumly. “I know this is still about that Meteor thing.  I even heard you ask if you could deliver these in person.”

Jyera paused after wiping the knife dry and setting it beside her. “…All right, yes, it does have to do with that.  It’s just—it keeps  _ expanding _ . I thought I would have my answers and that would be that, but it’s even worse now. There’s so much more to it than I thought, and… I cannot shake the feeling that it’s urgent.”

“Then why go about it alone? There  _ is _ middle ground between being a blabbermouth and hiding things from your friends, you know,” the miqo’te teased, flashing the peaks of her canine teeth.  “Arbert—how about you? I think that’s enough of the things for right now!,” she called out over Jyera’s head. “I don’t want to be out here washing them so late that I have to sleep outdoors next to a great pile of meat.”

The warrior looked startled, then chided, but gave her a gesture of acquiescence that seemed to satisfy her.  “Not that I’m looking forward to having to cook them all, mind you.”

Jyera laughed at that, and added, “We won’t have to do much. They’re only mole loaves, so we can just about ignore them for a good while before we have to worry about retrieving and delivering them.” She looked down at the collection and realized that nothing had specified how many of them was too many, but she did not think it hurt to be generous.  Why he would ask to spin her round through the quill-pushing of daily criers, especially only to procure materials so menial it was difficult to imagine why he would bother requiring said criers to hire adventurers to do it, was an explanation that fluttered long past her head.  It was heartening that her little band of new friends was willing to join in, as if the whimsical logic somehow spoke to them, too, and she had agreed they would all make the delivery together. 

“But first--first I wanted to ask you something. Naillebert.” 

He was seated against a moss-swept boulder, his portion of the work already salted and wrapped in a neat boarskin package beside him, only the broadcloth of his wide hat facing the world outside his readings. One arm languidly rose and twirled at the wrist, a wordless  _ carry on, then  _ to her to follow up.

“Well… Would you spar with me?”

The sorcerer lifted his head up until his expression bored itself into her eyes from beneath the retreating brim of his hat. “I do beg your pardon...?” he began in a flat drone. 

Jyera straightened, trying to bring as much of her height to bear with the gangly elezen who, even seated, seemed to loom over her like an aging willow. “Yes. I thought that if I had someone to practice with… especially if someone else would not mind spectating… I might learn something about myself.” 

“I’m not doing it for your  _ personal edification _ , if you’ll excuse my bluntness. Or, even if you  _ don’t _ , I still care naught about your idle speculations when what appears to  _ me _ to be of relevance is your response to life-and-death situations.” He returned abruptly to the wax-bound sheaf of literature in his hands. Jyera was about to protest, incensed, when the clink of a teacup upon its saucer was followed with the cultured cadences of their white mage’s speech.

“Naillebert, she’s exactly right--for the same reasons you are. You can’t have it both ways, you know.”

“Ehh? ‘Both ways’?”, he drawled. 

With a smile that was as regal as it was devilish, the older Lalafell added: “You do not at once get to complain about her performance in combat and do nothing about it. If she is still a stumbling antelope fawn  _ after _ we’ve given her as much opportunity as we can,  _ then _ you can gripe. But barring that, I think it would be a splendid exercise for her.” Lamimi frowned just then and turned to Jyera, tilting her head up with a look of concerned skepticism. “But whyever do you bring it up now, Jyera dear? This is the first I have heard you place such gravity in one of your tutoring requests.” 

Jyera answered faster than she could blink. “Because I don’t know why I knew what the map in the Ironworks’ office was saying.”

“You want thaumaturgy lessons… because of cartographic anxiety?”, the sorcerer interjected, less with derision as incredulity. Lamimi only crossed one of her arms in response, the other raised to grasp her jaw in contemplation. 

Jyera shook her head vehemently and lifted her hands in a placating gesture to let her elaborate. “No, not the map itself, the lettering or symbols or anything; it’s what was being plotted on the map that confuses me. Aetherometric inferences.” J’hroomale’s bubbly, reassuring affect broke through beside her just then, pupils needle-thin in her wide miqo’te eyes and an eyebrow launched past the peak of her striated forehead. “Aetherometry what-what?”, the bard prompted. It jarred Jyera’s courage out of slumber, and she smiled as J’hroomale urged her to continue. 

“The map has points plotted all over it with readings the engineers have been taking themselves. I have absolutely no way of explaining it properly, but it is sort of like… reading the voltage in an alchemical solution.” Her hands were animated with arcing, swimming motions that had little reference to the words she was speaking; yet, she suspected were she to stop, the words would fall away like cards in the deck of a sore gambler, scattered. “They can tell what aspect the aether is, which way it’s flowing, how much of it is flowing… and I don’t understand why I understand that. Moreover--”

“Get to the point,” Naillebert cautioned in a low, but uncharacteristically gentle tone. 

Jyera bristled visibly, but concluded, “--it’s all wrong, all of it. Some places much worse than others. And they think it has something to do with Dalamud. They--their chief engineer--believes Dalamud is getting physically closer to this star, and it’s causing bizarre things to happen to the climate, and the wildlife, and… well, actually everything. But he had it wrong, partly, on the map; it’s got nothing to do with where the aetherflow originates on our side. If something really is happening to the moon, it’s dragging the epicenter away from Silvertear Falls and toward--I thought I knew what it was called, but it borders Thanalan.” She inhaled, at last, and looked around with finality at her comrades. 

“And because you’re no scholarly, and scarcely a battlemage, to boot, it is totally absurd that you happened to be correct without guessing,” Naillebert finished for her, sighing. “Forgive me for saying so. Why, then, would war arcana be of any use to you? You’d go on winning trivia tournaments whether or not I lifted a finger to make you a better warrior.” 

A stiff, mist-laden breeze from the bay whisked its way up the cliffs, reminding them all how chilly dusk could be at seaside. The wisps of lamplight glowing in the oncoming fog reminded Jyera that the night would not wait for them to wrap things up; her awareness of the sudden moisture in the air reminded her also that wet wind had a way of snaking up the spaces between clothes and skin, leaving her cold to the bones. The hearth of her room in the Mizzenmast sounded like a sublime place to be.

“I can’t prove that it will. I only know that the feeling is the same--like being able to tell hot from cold, or one scent from another, or even how it feels to walk versus to swim.”

“Jyera, dear, speaking of such things, I am reminded--didn’t you want to prepare those mole loaves for tomorrow at some point this evening?”, Lamimi yawned, apologetic at the sign of fatigue. 

“...Oh, gods.” 

 

~

 

Jyera capped the candles in her room and glanced at the mumbling remains of the hearth fire, wondering whether to stifle them, too. Now she could say she was truly good and tired, her wrists heavy from processing the same materials for extended measures of time, until the loaves were ready to be baked into form and packaged. Her enigmatic outbursts were beginning to take on weight in the back of her mind, spelled out in front of her by her audience as they now were, and that made her most tired of all. 

She set the cap down on her dressing table and rubbed at her eyes with the inside pads of her palms. It had been enormously comforting to have Arbert give her a pat on the shoulder as they parted ways for the evening, good-naturedly encouraging her with as simple an explanation as he could find. “It beats slogging over hells’ half-acres for a pile of leves,” he’d said cheerfully, and oddly, it was convincing. 

Still, the gnawing sense that she might be meandering down a self-aggrandising false prophecy with them in tow, rather than gainfully expanding out of careers as the realm’s janitors of dangerous messes, persisted. If something didn’t dawn on her before sprouting into yet another tizzy of thorns and closed doors, soon, she feared it would not be long before she simply checked herself into the conjurers’ care indefinitely. At least then she could ramble about the moon and her forgotten knowledge by herself. 

Her feet ached in odd places, all of which seemed cross with her for not lying down yet. Jyera settled on closing the flue and letting the embers cool through the night on their own, flopping unceremoniously on the pressed starch of the bedcovers, linen nightgown fluttering over her ankles. She had earned herself a mouthful of her own braid, and had to roll over to right herself. 

Lying on her side, she twirled the little green bauble around in her fingers, staring alternately at the engraving in its surface and at the dimming glow of the hearth behind its place in her field of view. Some sort of good luck charm, she had taken to conclude, although a skeptic in the dark of her memory ever raised an indignant finger at that. It was a comforting trinket to hold, regardless; a tangible symbol that somewhere in her unfiltered babbling there was validity, and in her senses, veracity. She resisted the urge to peer behind the curtains of her window, in search of the bleeding beacon in the heavens that would not leave her alone. When sleep overtook her, the transition was abrupt. Like taking a blow to the head. She would awake later regretting that comparison.

 

~~~~

 

_ Colourless. No; oversaturated, suffocating. She rose to her feet on broken legs, taking in the unbreathable air. Her feet were drying toward splitting underneath her, with the dawning realisation that below her lay barren, irradiated earth. There was no sound in this blast zone--briefly. Her own breathing was conspicuous, deafening; and further on, the tinny echo of plate armor clanking to the ground.  _

_ Jyera moved not an ilm before the fog suddenly fanned open its cloak and Arbert appeared, slumped on his knees. He was in worse condition than even she; his lip was cracked open, the viscera of his eyes cloudy and dull. She was midway through the gesture of bounding toward him with a hand outstretched when two sickening, overwhelming noises occurred one after the other. A loud, nauseating crunch, and in the horrifying manner of a strawman, Arbert slumped forward, still lucid with shock. Then, the unmistakable, unforgettable, unbearable  _ bang _ of a firearm. She shrieked into the gaseous fabric of the air around her, her arms scrambling in front of her face that she might not see what she knew had just happened. It swallowed her voice with the gentle asphyxiation of an assassin’s handkerchief.  _

_ Her breathing returned to her ears as ragged and rasping, like a beast before death. There were exactly two sources of sound anywhere in this smoking mound of razed soil and bodies, now. The vapor of her panic, racing through her lungs, in and out her burning nose and dry mouth.  _

_ The almost delicate, royal chime of foreign armor, metal footsteps growing closer. A third broke the wall in her ears, muffled as it was through the jagged helm upon its speaker; a voice. “Interloper.” _

_ Too soft, too strange; the clarion of a Spoken, certainly, but just as low and dark as it was supple, feminine. “I ought to thank you. And yet… you reek so of my blood.”  _

_ The silver statue raised its lance without heed of Arbert’s life still running down its tip. It was aimed toward her when she saw the barrel and its fatal door-knocker. “And I cannot have that in my new world.” _

_ She did not know whether the bullet or the peak of the halberd was responsible for the walls of her throat tumbling to ruin.  _

 

The wooden floor tasted so bizarre that it snapped her awake, consciousness down her spine like the crack of a whip. Jyera rolled and rolled until her room spun around her. 

Her hands flew to her neck--and found its corridors sound and unbroken. Lurid and dizzy, she rolled again until her forehead faced the floorboards. It was cool on her skin, and though it was odd not have shed so much as a drop of sweat during her ordeal, she still felt the inferno of nightmare. When her breathing was slow, she spotted the engraved crescent tossed unceremoniously a few fulms from her bed. Jyera crawled toward it, cradling it in her palm, and stood tremulously.  _ Dreams are dreams.  _

One word, though, plucked so cruelly at the tensile string of her strange memories that it snapped with a song and a cascade of unnameable emotions. 

 

_ Interloper.  _

 

She slumbered in deep black the remainder of the night, waking upright half a bell before sunrise. 

 

~~~

  
  



	9. the hunter's moon _:://

The knock on his door at this godsforsaken hour was what surprised him. There was not a single employee in the whole of the Ironworks who would go out of their way to personally intrude upon him, early, on purpose; and so in his struggling and aching torpor, the frantic drumming of knuckles on his office door was particularly startling.

 

Cid swore under his breath, the drowsiness dragging his voice down into an annoyed rumble, and slowly raised himself out of his chair. He wasn’t making progress on the new diagrams, anyway. Ink blots born of accidental noddings-off polluted the otherwise austere and mathematical layout of what he hoped would be a predictive curve of aspect-over-time. For the nonce, it was no more informative than its predecessors, and notably less legible. 

 

He sidled past the stacks of filed documents and cases of crystal samples and approached the shadow-stifled embrassure of the locking mechanism in the door. Fumbling with it in the pre-dawn darkness eventually won him the springy click he sought, and with a long inhale to summon his composure, the creaking hinges slowly swung open. Who was it, then, that had the bright bloody idea to turn up when they ought both rightly be asleep?

 

He had to look down for his answer. It was the adventurer, the red-haired woman, the one slightly eerie in the manner in which her wide, wine-dark eyes bored through him. She looked like she had just seen her own ghost. Unsure whether he was experiencing insight or desperation, he opted to invite her in. At worst, he supposed, she would waste his time and the acuity of his headache would sharply increase, which would be an irksome but not expensive cost to cover for the sake of settling her nerves. At best… he had to admit there was something compelling about her, whether it was her candor alone or the uncanny, unsettling propensity she wielded for interpreting the breath of life that worked its way through the land’s aetherial pulse. 

 

Fatigued and heavy-headed as he was, it was a moment or so of exhausted regard before he gave up on choosing his words carefully.

 

“... What in the  _ seventh buggering hell  _ possessed you to come here at this hour?”, he half-slurred, and immediately felt the sting of regret and embarrassment that went with realising one has been brutish to something innocent. 

 

“I am so sorry--I wouldn’t have even considered it if not for--” She tightened the long knit shawl around her and shuddered deeply, her nose and mouth folding into the crook of her crossed, squeezing arms. “ _ \--Dalamud _ . I can’t sleep. I don’t know how to put this sensibly, but I can’t even leave the windows too loosely draped anymore. It’s as if it’s watching me… I cannot get it out of my head. Meteor; Dalamud. I hear it thrumming in my deep sleep. It will not leave me alone.” 

 

He did not respond at first. Running his gloved hand up through his hairline, he hung his head and sighed; long, low, deep. Spent. “Aye, that’s two of us, then. But why the hells would I be the authority to speak to on the matter of nightmares and fears? I’m hardly gifted in the cathartic, and haven’t the time to be, besides.” Gods, he was too harsh for this. 

 

“I don’t need to be comforted! I need to do something about it. I knew what your map meant. I’m certain of it now. I was not just guessing. I  _ knew _ .”

 

It hadn’t occurred to him that the first time might have been a guess, it now dawned on him. 

 

He reached up over the bridge of his nose and groaned quietly as he kneaded his face with his fingers. “I appreciate your passion and the insight you have brought me--do not doubt it. By the same token, I do not recommend dwelling on it overmuch when there’s no more work to be had on it.”

 

“You know that isn’t true. There is  _ too _ much more work.” The young woman squeezed her shawl around her more tightly, burrowing her head into it until he could only see her face from the eyes up. He found himself second-guessing divulging even the middling details to an adventurer, and yet--and yet he was hard-pressed to doubt her mind. He had checked her hypothesis. She was correct in ways that ran off with his appetite. 

 

He rolled his shoulders, shaking his head to and fro to put a little more of his consciousness into his choice of next words. 

 

“How do you propose to assist?” Open-ended. Hers to answer. 

 

She shifted in her seat, wiggling out of the grip of the shawl a bit. It fell past her shoulders to fold at her elbows. The shift underneath was a loose, airy cotton, he noticed--had she actually shown up in her godsgamned nightgown? “I want to help track Dalamud’s effects on the land. What you told those men and women at the ceruleum deposit--it has to be a continuous process, doesn’t it?” She stood up, dreamy eyes constricting in apprehension. “To keep changing the aspect of crystals--to make plants and animals grow…  _ wrong _ . If it’s as live as this--it should be trackable. Please, I beg of you--let me help you do that!” 

 

“I have a reluctant majority of my Ironworks on that task,” he replied flatly. 

 

“And all of them missed the correction on the map,” she retorted--bloody quickly. He hadn’t expected such a soft person to have such a sharp tongue. At this hour, and with as little sleep as he’d had, he was becoming certain that between the two of them, she was the better armed.

 

His response was an unbecoming snort. The young woman--he was embarrassed to realise that he could not at present recall it exactly. Jura? Yuris? Neither was right, and normally, he was more gifted with names. Gods, he was tired. She stiffened visibly, looking oddly defeated. “Nay--forgive my rudeness. ‘Twas my fool decision to abandon a proper night’s rest. Rather--” A long yawn interrupted him, at which he groaned and massaged the space between his tired eyes. “I would reconvene with you in the daylight hours. Perhaps--perhaps where we last met. I ought to visit the airship landing again anyway--avoiding patrols invites, erm, some extra opportunities for damages.” 

She was silent for a few moments. Gradually, the tension slid out of her frame and made her own fatigue the much more obvious. Nodding slowly, she stepped just a bit closer to him, which was yet another surprise. He could see the shape of her hands where they clung to the shawl around her. 

 

“...Thank you.” 

 

It was, as with every other action she had taken, a bit of a shock. “Ah--?”, he started, but a flurry of shakes of her enrobed arms bade him withhold his doubts. 

 

“No, no. Do not. Just--thank you. Thank you, Master Garlond.” 

 

It would be too much longer before he pieced together why, exactly, but he offered his own interjection. 

 

“It’s ‘Cid’. You may just call me Cid.”

 

She blinked, rapidly, apparently taken off-guard. The tiny bleed of the horizon outside his window obscured what he would swear was a rose tinge rising in her cheeks, and the tips of her ears. 

 

“...Thank you, Cid.” 

 

After she left, the clouds in his mind got into a drowsy argument with some other consciousness inside him. His name sounded foreign on her lips. It sounded sweet.

 

~~~~~

  
  



	10. :::_turn up the signal

Sliding her room shoes off by the door, Jyera stepped barefoot on the flooring of her quarters, hoping her escape would remain silent.  The skyline outside was taking on the telltale lilac of sunrise, but, desperately tired, she wanted to go back to bed and try to recover some of the stolen rest.

 

Even with her face stuffed deep in the linen of her pillow, though, sleep would not come back for her. Eventually, in a haze, she resigned to bathing and dressing early and trying to collect her thoughts in a pot of tea from the  _ Wench _ . The inn and the  _ Drowning Wench _ , while in technicality not a single establishment, nevertheless  shared their portion of the Mizzenmast in affable cooperation. Patrons of the  _ Wench  _ paid off their tabs with a slap of gil on the countertop (or the chair, or the floor, or the unfortunate waitresses), stumbling gleefully to their inn rooms; in return, sleepers broke their fast under the barkeep’s care--a perennially cheerful man named Baderon of whom Jyera was already fond--whether through a morning stout or any of the coffees and teas that trafficked through the ports below. 

 

Baderon was already up and about, all but bouncing on his feet and humming as he prepared a row of kettles for their first daily tasks. He greeted her as she sluggishly proceeded toward a table, and she managed to mumble something to the effect of ‘ _ mmbborning _ ’ before it dawned on her that she was not alone in the dining area. 

 

Every single one of her comrades was slouching over a cup or bowl of something, and they looked every bit as harrowed and exhausted as she. Jyera’s eyes felt as though they had widened past their natural limits. “What… what happened?”

 

“Nightmares,” their knight grumbled. “Nay, more as like the same nightmare, the whole lot of us.” A syncopated stagger of nodding heads followed his statement. “How ‘bout yourself? Ye don’t look like you’ve had a nice drift off, if ye don’t mind me saying.”

 

She swallowed. “Nightmare, too. Why--”

 

J’rhoomale groaned and picked up her head, hoisting it on her upright neck like an overlarge strawman with a pendulous bag of popotoes for a face. Her ears were pressed flat against her head, so much so that she might have been taken for a hyur if one managed to miss the vertical pupils of her bright green eyes. They were less bright this morning. “We’re talking about it now. Feel like sharing?”

 

“What did we  _ eat _ ,” Jyera muttered, as if groping for an easy explanation. 

 

“Don’t ken it,” the miqo’te replied, rubbing her eyes. “But this didn’t feel like an underdone turnip dream.” 

 

Jyera felt flesh and blood and bone turn to solid ice as each of her party in turn described the other side of the same hellish vision she had had--save one detail. The woman--man?--statue clad in silver had not spoken in theirs. 

 

“...So…”

“Mmmphm”, Naillebert replied, classically cool and bored. 

“Wait,” J’hroomale started, suddenly, sitting upright. Jyera could not tell if it was her coffee--black as pitch and twice as hot--or epiphany, but the miqo’te seemed as alert as she had ever been before. 

 

They each, collectively, turned their attention on her. 

 

“I know what this felt like. Was this--an ‘echo’?”

 

The entire room was silent for an era. 

 

“Why was hers different, then?”, Arbert supplied, a concerned frown darkening his boyish features. 

 

Jyera was still holding her teacup to her lips, eyes drifting between the speakers. 

 

“...Wait. Does she know?”

 

“About what?”, Jyera said softly. Fatigue made the voices of her friends run together in muffled obscurity. Jyera opted simply to take another sip of the blazing tea, her eyes watering as the ceramic of the cup scorched her tongue. 

 

“Bugger me. She wouldn’t know, would she.”

 

Jyera set the cup down with a fierce  _ clank  _ of finality. “What would I not know.” It was not, per se, a question. 

 

Again as a group, they each turned to her; looked anxiously at one another; resolved to let someone else speak first. Lamimi began, slowly. “We never told you how we came together… did we?” Jyera didn’t answer. Her mind was a cloud of unmiscible fears, stray suppositions, open-ended suspicions. 

 

“...We should walk and talk. After this,” the knight interjected, nodding to one of the barmaids as she stood awkwardly balancing a larger-than-life bowl of porridge. Jyera drained the rest of the teapot in silence, chewing through whatever manner of egg pastry she had ordered (and that fatigue had banished the memory thereof). 

 

~

 

“I went ahead and turned in those mole loaves, I hope you don’t mind. Turns out the Ironworks weren’t asking for them directly; ‘twas the local paper and news crier. They were awfy mysterious about the whole thing, but when whatever they were waiting for hits the press, these prisms’ll show it.” J’hroomale’s voice sounded as though it came from a hodge-podge tin can linkpearl, over the hiss and spat of spells firing from caster to caster. 

 

As a group, they had opted to hold a sparring session sooner than later; Jyera’s focus was louder than the ambient sound around her, or perhaps only undifferentiated--aether was aether, after all. Sensations seemed to have a habit of bleeding together in the trance of casting. Were someone to break said trance with a rude shove of her shoulder--or whatever it would take to dislodge her concentration--she thought the only means of putting those sensations to language would be to approximate them as the geometric calligraphy in her journal. Without translation, their frustrated abstractions were the next best outlet. 

 

A beam of scorching flames narrowly missed her head, imparting a curious, grazing pain to the aura of her nose and mouth. A voice she recognised as Naillebert’s made a sudden shout of disgust, which she took to be pain, and called for a time out. 

 

Jyera breathed deeply, in and languidly out. She noted idly that the faces around her were a mix of nervous and concerned, and wondered--feeling oddly buoyant, pink, and dreamy--why this was so. 

 

“ _ Amazingly _ ,” the elezen sputtered, rattling his neck and shoulders in something between a convulsion and a stretch, “And I should add that I haven’t the foggiest how it ought be, unless you are some manner of idiot genius--” Lamimi thumped his slouching back with her grandstaff, unsubtly chastising him. He cleared his throat with a dry cough and stood up straight. “--Your strikes are hardest when you are disorganised in aspecting your casts. I know not what magicks you do wield, but they are not thaumaturgy. Not as I know it. Perhaps it was a different philosophy in your place of birth.” 

 

Jyera thought about her place of birth for a moment, realising most of her recollections were really just solipsistic; her child self’s hands playing in the ocean water, her mother’s voice from far away, the suspended-animation feeling of diving in deep, impossibly wide seas. It made her toes tingle. That ocean seemed without mapping, it was so far afield. 

 

“What do you mean, ‘disorganised in aspecting’?”, she ventured, as a means of shaking off the nostalgic ache. 

 

“Just so. Thaumaturgy depends upon the fluctuation between aspects, and yet when you  _ do _ apply this principle appropriately, one hardly feels the mallow at the end of his spear begin to toast. To wit; I have now got a magicked bruise of sorts in three separate clusters of my chest, and I shall thank you not to perform any celebratory body-slams in the near future. Those were nigh unaspected strikes, and it boggles the mind how one can fail  _ so spectacularly _ at transposing astral to umbral that the resultant bludgeoning is actually  _ worse _ for it.”

 

“Thal’s balls, I think the man’s just left you a compliment,” their knightly Roegadyn said with a coarse bout of laughter. 

 

“Anyroad…”, he continued, lifting Naillebert from his wobbling feet. “Ye needed to know what we were on about this morning. I’ll tell it short--our dreams were an Echo.” They each took a turn at looking somber, anxious. “You walk around in other people’s memories; ye know things you shouldn’t know. We all met through a haven for Echo-bearing folk, early on. At least, ‘til--”

 

“Mmmm, the Waking Sands. What did they call it, again? The ‘path of the Twelve’. Thought it might be related to the gods somehow.” J’hroomale’s interruption accompanied an uncomfortable crossing of her arms, as if thinking were uncomfortable to do. 

 

Lamimi dabbed at Naillebert’s forehead with a cloth,  _ tsk _ -ing ruefully at him. “Heavens, dear, it was only a little sparring session…”

 

Jyera hugged herself. It seemed like a reasonable explanation--stranger things had brought misfit groups together, and adventurers were obligate misfits before all else--but it was not satisfying, yet. She withheld as much of her judgment as she dared. 

 

“Aye, that. We weren’t but strangers to one another until--see, we were all joined up to a partner of sorts, for a time. Idea was, Echo folk would team up with other Echo folk and learn as they went about what the whole lot meant. Was working just fine, but…”

 

Lamimi finished for them; of their number, she was ever the most gifted at gently, but bluntly, swiftly, breaking the hardest part of the story. “A number of us were children and kin of Ala Mhigo. My companion got swept up in an act of resistance against the Empire that, as cruel luck would have it, also took a number of our other companions. I’ve no idea why I went along with it.”

 

“Yours also think it was a bright idea to try pawing an airship off the bastards?”

 

“Ah, well, she hardly complained about it, if that’s what you mean…”

 

Jyera was finding their voices difficult to disentangle. The smoke filled up her lungs and seared the dewy exteriors of her eyes, her companions’ conversation stifled and stamped down by plumes of spent ceruleum powder and razed soil dust. She marveled that they could not sense these, and wondered if perhaps she was having another chaotic dream, and her body was really still in bed within the Mizzenmast. 

 

Pawing smoke out of her face and holding the scruff of her robe up over her nose, Jyera trudged through the fiery fog, afraid and bewildered. She saw the faces of men she knew--somehow or another, as if she’d seen their portraits in print before, or met them in passing--were Ala Mhigan. Faces that were plunged, wan and greying, into the ignominy of the unhallowed ground to which they had been dropped. She heard the too-telling thud of a body that had held life in it only recently being disposed of some yalms away. The forms of warriors that sent a wave of nostalgia through her belly darted in between the hot blue cloud-to-cloud lightning of ceruleum ammunition going off. Hazily, Jyera saw it through the iron wind of combat--a face like the brow of a death’s head, smothered in the coiled metal fuselage of a mask built to survive a storm of poison gas. If there were other sensations in that scene, they were naught but tatters overshadowed by that indomitably severe sculpture. A woman standing next to her made her vows and parting regrets to her own companion, who came slowly into view as the choking fumes dissipated. J’rhoomale. The miqo’te whirled in her direction, confounded. “Hey--! Is that you, Jyera? Oh, Jyera, can you hear me? Yoo-hoo…!”

 

~

 

“...Hel-lo-lo, Hydaelyn calling! Look alive, right, come now!” 

 

Jyera opened bleary eyes to find herself leaning heavily on the bard’s shoulder, feeling cold and exhausted, and mightily confused, besides. 

 

Lamimi put a diminutive hand on Jyera’s forehead and pressed in, gently. “Matron’s mulberries, dear, you went white as a funeral shroud just now. Do you suppose you overextended yourself in your match with Naillebert?” That was enough to ground her in the moment. Embarrassment. It was one thing to have odd inklings and disturbing dreams… 

 

“I’m-uhm--”, she mumbled, rubbing at her temples. “--dozed off, maybe?” 

“I don’t think so,” J’hroomale said softly. “I remember that day very clearly, and it was before you and I met. But I saw you in my memories just now, and I think that that means--”

 

“She has it too?”, Arbert finished for her, tentatively. He had peered in between the shoulders of their two tallest comrades, only now wiggling forth into view. “I suppose they couldn’t have found everyone with the Echo in one short go…” 

 

Jyera straightened, recalling the other errand she’d yet to tick off for the day. “I’mprobablyfine,” she answered confidently, all in the one word. “Sowhass an Echo again?”

 

The answer made some of her recent peculiarities a little more intelligible.

 

“I do wish you could have met the young lady in charge of us, though. Minfilia was such a boon to our little group’s growing friendship. I wonder what she’s up to now…”

 

Half memory, and half dream, Jyera saw Minfilia at her desk in the Waking Sands. She smiled ear to ear until her eyes crinkled prettily, and waved to Jyera enthusiastically with one whole arm in motion.  _ I cannot wait to meet you, Jyera,  _ her voice seemed to say, somewhere out of bounds of her unmoving lips. Jyera blinked, and all scenes but the one in front of her most concrete senses vanished. She meant to meet Master Garlond--to meet  _ Cid _ \--at the airship landing sometime before dusk came too close. 

 

“Oh, don’t worry, you’re not like to miss out on anything fun. Now, let’s see what this posting is, here,” J’rhoomale beamed. The grin turned to ripe disdain once she’d read over the bulletin entry, however. “ _ Caravan duty?  _ Gods damn it all.”

 

Jyera drank deeply from a cistern of ice-cold well water, patted her forehead dry, and regarded the lift controls with wide, cautious eyes. As the elegant metalwork made its ascent, her heart started to beat faster, and then faster again when the airship landing was only one more stop away. 

 

The gating of the lift shifted open as it docked at the landing, and she walked off it like a phantom floating on air. She felt light-headed and a bit over-warm at the edges. Her heartbeat was untranslatable amid the thrumming and the resonance that hoisted these moments to their stellar heights. 


	11. ::_// be the wind

When she found him, he was, again, crouched at the belly of another aircraft, this time tinkering with an open panel on its nearest propeller. He appeared to be enjoying himself.

 

As she all but tiptoed over to him, he seemed to follow some preternatural instinct for her presence, and drew himself up to standing, turning to face her.

 

“Hah! You decided to arrive after all,” he called in a cheerful bark.  Tucking away the set of needle-nosed pliers with which he had been working, Cid folded his arms and stood wearing something like a light smirk on his face. He was met with an unappreciative pout from Jyera, who winced at the slight. “...Ah, mayhap that was in poor taste,” he added, a bit hastily, his expression turning serious in a way that struck Jyera as nearly put-on.

 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting,” she answered. The words were spoken plainly, unentangled from any real anxiety. “Anyway--why here, and not in your office, I forgot to ask?” Her head tilted inquisitively, wide eyes fixed on him.

 

“ _Well_ ,” he began, “‘Twould seem to me there are more practical applications for your--skills, I suppose I could say--than merely shutting you up among the data the Ironworks has already collected and processed. It would be wasted on you.” Jyera pricked up an eyebrow at that, a look of innocent confusion wandering over her eyes and mouth. Cid lowered his head contemplatively, furrowing the space between his closing eyes, and added, “I would--your consent given, of course--see you apply it in the field. I do hope you will not harbour any beliefs that I think of you as a new recording tool, incidentally, but I cannot afford not to ask of you to try.”

 

“You… want me to map out an aetherflow, out in the land?” Had she a mirror on hand, she would have found doe-eyed incredulity staring back at her. The thought seemed impossibly imprecise, perhaps even impossible on principle. Yet…

 

“Aye, just so. Forgive me for saying so, but I am helplessly curious what you will do if I put you in front of a live crystal.” He regarded her with quiet--if ardent--attention. Jyera’s, however, had shifted to the craft behind him, much as some quality of the hangar’s lamp lighting had brought a very distracting arrow of gold over his strong features. She realised the aircraft was a ship rather unlike the others she had seen hangared in this very deck; sleeker, somehow, with a sail of deep, atmosphere blue stretched over its back, a crest of his company seal stamped proudly upon its prow. It reminded her simultaneously of some exotic giant insect, with its translucent, venous wings flowing out at the sides, and of the sort of gentle giant that swam an hundred years at sea.

 

She must have been looking at it for an incriminatingly long while, she thought, for Cid had caught on to the object of her gaze. “Ah, this? This is mine own airship--I built her entirely on my own, from the boards on her deck to the wiring in her engine. _Enterprise.”_  

 

That got Jyera’s attention turned back to his face, her look of wondrous unfamiliarity unchanged. “‘Her’? Is Enterprise--’her’ name?”

 

He flashed a brief, embarrassed smile before explaining. “Yes. And, yes, as is rather the custom among sailors, so too it is among builders and pilots of airships; addressing each craft with the honour of a fine lass.” His arms unfolded and dropped to his sides. “But to return to the point--I have what I confess only amounts to a _hunch_ that your knowledge of aetheric networks might extend to the terrain itself. If, somehow, that were the case… I would not have to rely on reconstructions of what my readings say. We would be able to infer at least semi-reliably whence the aspects of crystals _in vivo_ are draining.”

 

Jyera lifted a hand to her mouth, half-closing it in thought as the implications dawned on her. “...And if you knew that… you might be able to predict where the thing sucking it all up is going to go next. Wouldn’t that mean you could also--”

 

“Estimate Dalamud’s position in the heavens, should that premise of my hypothesis stand true? That is exactly my thinking.” His eyes twinkled with a little flicker of intelligent flame. To Jyera’s increasing surprise, the sight made her heart skip a beat. That was curious, she thought afterwards, puzzled.

 

“Right then. Enough of my nattering on about it--shall we get to it?”

 

“Now? How--” She paused, the pieces clicking together in her mind. “On your airship? I’ve--”

 

“Fastest route of getting there. Not without risk, however. As you are well aware, imperial military presence has been steadily increasing and pushing further inland. They’re not like to miss a non-military ship crossing their proximal airspace. Even so… I plan on investigating a site on the other side of Thanalan. Easterly of their ingress to the western peninsula, south of what appears to be their path into the Twelveswood.”

 

Jyera thought it over, scanning the ship with apprehension. “...Is it safe to ride passenger on her?”

 

He gave an enthusiastic nod of reassurance, an arm raised to invite her to board. “If you have any other preparations, you may treat with them now--”

 

“No, I haven’t any.”

 

Cid gave her another nod, serious this time, and gestured for her to follow. It was only from standing behind him now at relatively close distance that she noticed the embroidery on his jacket, right between the shoulderblades. A sort of _fleur-de-lis_ adjoining the seams of the garment, which she could now also determine was made of a very peculiar hide. Not quite leather as it was tanned in the region, a sturdy, greyish material covered with short and nearly undetectable white bristles; intricate as was some of the leathercraft she had seen before, this was decidedly unique. She shook away the distraction and took cautious steps up the squat stairs to the loading platform, trying--and failing--not to look down between the slats at the baldly steep drop many yalms below into the receding path into seawater. Jyera did not think she was afraid of heights, but this strict departure from solid ground…

 

She swallowed her nerves, squeezed her eyes shut, and stiffly boarded the rest of the way to the ship’s deck, marching squarely to a support beam at the center of the craft onto which she could hold.

 

“One moment while I get her warmed up. Ah--and there she goes! Ha, I knew it was just the armature in the propeller… Ready?”, he called over his shoulder. Jyera found this less-restrained, animated Master Garl-- _Cid_ \--a marked transformation. Easing herself from her safe spot, she nodded vigorously and raised her hand in an affirmative gesture she hoped would hide the tremor running along the outer surface of her arms.

 

“Where did you say we were going again?”, she found herself asking him with pitchy, poorly concealed apprehension.

 

“A little corner of Thanalan less like to be under imperial surveillance,” he answered, “Although in fairness to you, I ought be honest and add that if we are somehow successful in our findings there, we would not be remiss a visit some ways over to Gridania. As I understand it, they’ve some of the intelligence adventurers have gathered on the Empire’s movements east of the Twelveswood.” Jyera mouthed a nervous _Oh_ in response as the dock beneath them groaned loudly.

 

“Right then,” the engineer called out, “Let us be away. Enterprise, _engage!_ ” He was enjoying himself entirely too much, she thought, as he leaned fully over at the chest with his hands at the great polished-wood steering wheel, and the vehicle broke free of the landing with an otherworldly buoyancy and a surge of lift. Jyera realised she was being expected to stand upright on her own two feet, on the even boarded surface of the ship, without so much as a harness in sight, and she yelped pathetically at her oversight.

 

She wailed at the upwind thrust of takeoff and clung to the railing as though she would instantly die without both her hands on it at once, wondering if she were somehow mistaken and Master Garlond was really only an unstable madman whose mechanical celerity had won him an air of authority.

 

Yet, even as she clung to the railing and buried her face against the wood paneling, Jyera did find herself admitting that there was a certain tranquility about the craft. The thrumming of the ceruleum engine lent a quiet pulse to the constituent, inanimate parts that by his hand alone, fit together as did the living cogs of a body. The creaking of the wings was unsettling, like the groaning of some massive arthritic bird; and yet as she dared to look up from her hiding place, the sheen of the webbed wings rolled opalescent in her vision, pausing the quiver of fear in her skin.

 

She peered over to where he stood at the wheel. Although the noise was leveling off as they reached a certain altitude, he had remained more or less silent; it was difficult to see his expression, but what little glimpse that she caught from round the corner of his head told her it had gone taciturn again--the look of a man steeling himself against his doubts. Jyera shuddered and sat up just enough to look out over the railing and down to the earth below, out of lamentable curiosity. La Noscea was rapidly disappearing beneath them, the flash of the sea sharp from the afternoon sunlight; it was a strange mix of enchanting and appalling that left her feeling less and less grateful for the cold ambivalence of gravity the longer she looked.

It was then that Cid spoke, breaking the stoic hush that so far had characterized his piloting. “You do realize you can stand up?”, he said, mildly puzzled, but courteous. “Ah, and you can let go of that railing at your leisure. You needn't hold on to anything while you are on board.”

Jyera glowered at the back of his head, answering exasperatedly, ''Now you say! I--I've never been on an airship before. If you'd told me it was going to be terrifying, I might not have agreed to board!”

 

His response was less than ideal in her opinion. Cid burst into uproarious laughter, his broad shoulders vibrating with amusement.

 

“Ha! Well, there have certainly been worse ways to be introduced to flight. Come on now, woman, have a go at getting up and walking along the deck. I assure you it really is stable; I expect no less of one of my airships, and I daresay I _demand_ a great deal more of them.”

 

Jyera's stare stayed fixed on the back of his head, and she was still sour at having been laughed at, but his confidence and her growing curiosity saw her gingerly rise to her feet, where she then ventured to walk as far from where her hand held onto the railing as her arm would allow at full extension. Then, urged on primarily out of stubbornness, she took her first two steps without a hold on something solid, along the planks of an airborne vessel. It was an understatement to say that the sensation was dizzying; her skull felt as though it were full of heated soap bubbles, any one of which would at any moment rupture and send her mind out into the void of space, and it was only this concentration on the sensations of her head that kept the dead weight of nausea out of her stomach. She did not dare look as she had over the edge of the ship walls, or its strangely sturdy wiring, to the garish three-dimensional map of the land that stretched out below them.

 

There was even a moment where she began to feel herself echoing his confidence in the construction of such a completely insane invention as could hoist living beings into the windy heights of the sky without so much as a belt buckle attaching them to something secure. She moved toward him, to speak with him about their progress. How much longer it would be before they landed, and so on, when a gust that felt like the greedy jaws of some cloudborne predator clamped onto the belly of the Enterprise. Cid only flinched a little, and at that, only to flexibly maintain his posture at the wheel; Jyera, for her part, let out a terrified shriek like that of a woman who is convinced she has just received the push of her mortal ending, her eyes flying shut as the sudden movement shoved her toward the nearest steady form that her flailing arms could reach.

 

Her wish was granted with a sudden thud of her face against something warm and solid, around which she realized she had flung her arms and coiled them into a tight vice. As the turbulence around them seemed to stabilise once more, she allowed one of her eyes to peel itself open and observe what surface exactly had acted as her savior in her moment of terror. The surface, for its own part, had given up a startled hitch and stiffened, like the taut hide of a cornered animal, and now held itself in cautious, expectant austerity. Pressed so closely against its outline, her eyes could only make out the general characteristics of that to which she clung.

 

Stiff leather, some of which was sleek and knitted, fitted with loops for a tool belt and several other accommodations besides; some of which, especially that which was closest to her face, coated in the fine stiff bristles of white which the tanning process had not removed, and through which silk threads and embroidered seams had been stitched. She became aware presently of the scents that clung to these garments, a blend that under other circumstances might have been repugnant. The sharp and caustic perfume of ceruleum gas; the flat and earthy odor of real leather, drizzled throughout with bursts of machine oil; the smoke of an engine fire--and, enchantingly, between and beneath these waves, the subdued warmth of spice and musk belonging to the flesh and bones of a man. The very man, in fact, around whom she had unceremoniously wrapped her arms in a moment of ardent panic.

 

Jyera froze.

 

“Are... Are you quite out of your mind?''  Cid asked incredulously. He then seemed embarrassed by his choice of words, falling silent and trying to relax his posture for her. The warmth of his body, especially as it loosened its care in her grip, wafted more of these strange and unique--and compelling--sensations deeper into her consciousness. The rumble of his dark baritone reverberated through the canals of her arm bones, sending a shocking bolt of heat down under her skirts.  What followed was the pain of realizing that her shins had collided with the piloting platform at some point during her  lunge for safety, and she slackened a bit, letting out a little groan of both pain and annoyance.

 

She heard and felt him sigh. “Mayhap it was poor judgment on my part for laughing. You must know, though, I was not trying to trick you. Enterprise is as safe and sturdy as you could want out of an aircraft; I built her such that a dancer could stand en pointe on the deck in the middle of a spring zephyr.  Now, if you could find it in your heart to free me from your clutches...” She looked up and saw that he had turned his head toward her, wearing an irritatingly handsome smirk, and she gradually let go, gripping the back panel of the pilot platform until her knuckles turned white. She looked down at her shoes, unable to pick which of her flurry of thoughts to say out loud.

 

Cid turned his whole body sidelong to face her, one hand still firm on the wheel. “That having been said... if it would settle your nerves and make this journey and any that follow it a good deal smoother, I could try to demonstrate for you.”

 

Jyera squinted at him, now predominantly out of curiosity. ''You're going to dance en pointe...?”

 

Cid shook his head, his shoulders loosening in an ostentatious display of wonder at her interpretive prowess. “Nay, I'm not built for dancing. I'm told my legs are too short,” he answered with a mischievous grin. ''I do not, however, mind walking you about a bit, if you think you can stomach hanging on to me instead of any of the railing. Preferably not at the waist.” At that, he locked the wheel and moved toward her. It was a bizarre sight to her; he walked as though the wind itself didn't dare nudge him out of the way, his paces soft and steady as though they were not aboard a level surface at their increasingly chilly altitude. He shifted his gloved elbow toward her and made a beckoning motion with his head.

 

It took Jyera several ticks of the hour too many to infer his meaning. “...Your… your actual arm? Where should…?” She gestured hesitantly at the wrist, the elbow, of his gauntlet.

 

“Anywhere is fine. ‘Tis only an anchor.” He looked away from her, eyes piercing the cloud line in front of him. Jyera settled for placing her palm overtop the thickest portion of padding on his wrist. It seemed innocuous enough; her pulse apparently disagreed, however, picking up with a flutter as she made contact with the silver-knit leather squares. He felt alarmingly sturdy underneath it, and the suddenly narrower distance between them felt electric. Turning his head her way and inspecting her grip, Cid gave her a curt nod. “All right.”

 

One boot fell forward with a cinching of leather and the duller clank of its metal plating. Jyera wobbled, anxiously out of step, before following. Her fingers plucked themselves reluctantly one by one from the support of the rails, and taut weightlessness welled up in her head. It felt no less than miraculous that the wind didn’t simply tear her off the ship right where she stood, once one step turned into two, and then three, with nothing but Master Garlond’s own body linking her to the deck.

 

She must have gone exceptionally rigid, she figured, for when he spoke up again it was to inform her that in a few more paces, he would have her let go of him. “--But only if I ascertain that you have not, in fact, gone in spirit to well beyond the orbit of this star. Are we clear on that?” Away up into his hairline, again, went an eyebrow, as pure white as the rest of his head.

 

Jyera shook herself out of her dizzy haze and sighed. “Yes.” She tried not to be loud when she gulped at that.

 

They had circled about to the other side of the helmsman’s platform, when Cid stopped, slow steps arriving at their end. “Off you go, then,” he urged her, nudging gradually out of her reach. She inhaled sharply, freshly aware that the ship was still moving; shutting her eyes was merely reflexive.

 

“Ah, and you may want to look where you’re going. That is, if you don’t fancy knocking yourself on the shins again.” She heard him step back up to the wheel, and, steadying her breathing, willed herself to lift her eyelids.

 

The nigh-endless sky spread out in front of her. Unfathomably blue, and blood-tinged with the fast-approaching night, it bore veritable mountains and oceans of clouds, a haphazard ecosystem of snow-capped peaks and rolling valleys, layer upon layer above the grit of solid earth. She was stunned, and it lifted away the brunt and the vestiges all of her fear. They could have been paused on foot on a trail through the highlands, as far as her feet could tell, save that this soared leagues above any highlands she knew.

 

“This is--this is--”

 

“Eh? Speak up, if you would! Between the breeze and the engine I haven’t the ears for whispering. Hah!”

 

“This is _incredible_ .” She breathed out the last word. “ _Incredible_.”

 

Mesmerised, she turned her attention to him, the awe beaming from her face. He had looked over her direction, wearing an affable smirk. “I had a feeling you might take to it, once you found your footing… if you’ll forgive the pun.”

 

She found herself bursting into elated gales of laughter, high and above the scale of the pun--which, for whatever reason, she found charming--a surge of triumph and delight flooding the sound. She _ran_ , childishly animated, widdershins around the helmsman’s post. “ _This is amazing_ ! How can it--how did you-- _amazing_!” She ground to a stop in front of the post, looking up at him breathlessly.

 

The smirk shifted into something a little less readable, but that she thought might be a pensive, tentative smile. “She’s buoyant. The charge of the ceruleum engine is not unlike a kind of magnet--so long as all the critical infrastucture is sound, Enterprise will always fly more or less parallel to the ground.” Yes, she realised, and her eyes widened even further than before. That was a genuine smile, of pride, and of something else less clear. “Now, don’t go flinging yourself off the end of her, by any means. But you are in her expert carriage, be sure of that.”

 

Jyera regarded the floor contemplatively for a moment, thinking the matter through. When she looked up again, a stray current of wind batted her hair against the side of her head, and she reached up to fumble with it; having secured a flying bouquet of braid and free fibers, she looked back to Cid and smiled, wide and energetic. Briefly, he returned the grin. Not a second later, however, the steely look of impatient dread was back on his features, and he tilted his head up to search the high reaches of sky above them.

 

Jyera found herself doing the same as the onset of a burning headache arrived. “...There it is,” she murmured, close enough for him to overhear. His response better resembled a growl than a statement.

 

“Aye. _Dalamud_.”

 

Though it was no larger and no closer than the greater moon in the middle of the afternoon, the spectral bloodspot in the heavens stood out, stark and lurid, against the oncoming starlight. It drilled through her brain, a red firepick straight from the coals. “...How much further until we arrive?”, she asked him weakly.

 

Through the slats of her fingers as they rubbed at her skull, she saw him tense up and look out over the starboard rail. Shaking his head with a shrug, he answered, “I’d say we’re about as well ready to begin descending. I tried to keep us above that thicker layer of clouds, but it’s thinning out. Nothing behaves right under that red glare, damn it.” He was scowling. “I would ask you to hold onto something, but it almost seems a waste of all the effort that went into getting you to stand by yourself in-flight.” The scowl splintered. His expression now reminded her of the giddy asynchrony of a crushed up map, topography staggered and bunched into cartoonish, wobbling ambiguity. There was a creasing at the corners of his eyes that gave him away in the end, and it won him a tired, nervous giggle from her.

 

“Right. Well. Remember, we’re still going to be level to the ground--don’t let the change in my steering get to you, and it oughtn’t be too dramatic.” Spoken, she realised, softer than before.

 

Landing was neither what Jyera would have called pleasant, nor as terrorising as she expected. There was a spine-tingling appeal about riding the waves of wind down through thick cloud, of being engulfed in mist so fine that it scarcely left a drop of water on the skin on the way out. It did perilously remind her of how it must feel to ride a wooden plank down the mortal angle of a steep mountainside--but she did, indeed, feel the protective hum of the ceruleum engine below her feet, with its field of soothing, stabilising charge. When they broke through the last sheet of cirrus that lay between them and visible earth, a wild and shrubby corner of Thanalan Jyera did not recognise hurried around below. “...Here?”

 

“Ah, well, I figured I could hardly drop the two of us and my ship down the ceruleum gorge, after our little scuffle with Grand Company skirmishers,” he explained, a conspiratorial brow raised in her direction. “But this ought to link up that way reasonably well, and at any rate puts us at the floodplain from Silvertear if naught else.” Jyera was amazed to find herself disappointed as Enterprise slowly whirred down, contacting the ground with an oddly springy bounce of lighter-than-life metal armature. “Not a luxurious parking spot, admittedly…” Cid frowned at either side of him, clearly having to settle for where they touched down.

He began to walk stiffly into the brush, withdrawing a sheaf of pieces of parchment from the larger bag clipped at his belt. Jyera stared at the airship for several long moments, bemused and admiring, before moving to follow him.

 

“Why here?”, she inquired in a hush as she caught up to him. “Ah, and--what precisely were you hoping I would be able to do?”

 

“That was the problem, I confess. This venture is of _exemplary_ imprecision, or I’d like as not have assigned a few of my best in the Ironworks to try it themselves.” He flipped over one of the pages of notes, a spark of insight going off in his eyes as he found what he was looking for. “Hah! There’s the little bastard. Alright, here--I’ve made a rough copy of this section of the map, per your revisions.” She took it from him with both hands, her heart stuttering a little at the phrasing; more like an honourable, professional contribution, than the reality simply that her senses worked faster than her reason. “That is about as far ahead as I had hammered out, methods-wise. Whatever you did to reach the conclusion you made in my office--if you’ve any conception of what that was--contrast what you observe now with that map. Oh, and--” He reached into one of the buckled pockets at his waist-- “If you need it, there’s a stylus. A quill, really, only encased in metal… bah! Never mind that. I am anxious to get this finished…”

 

She took the contraption, admiring the lightness of the metal and the elegant way it trapped the ink inside it. “Ah…” She started, hesitating, then excitedly raised a finger-- _eureka!_ \--shrugging off the canvas bag with her inventory inside it. Hurriedly she pulled out the bulky journal and her ‘lucky stone’--at least, that was how she now thought of it--propping the stylus, the slip of map, and the stone in the groove of the book’s open spine. She was aware lastly of Cid’s total failure to keep his eyes off her and her little ritual, before--

 

 _There_ was the familiar prickling, something qualitatively distinct even from the excitable tremor that lightning thaumaturgy imparted to the skin, the bone. The transmutative sensation of her body in space only just slightly subluxating; as if at the very back of her brain there was a hidden door, and that door was _open_ . Through its threshold, the land was _alive_ ; Cid had estimated their target location rather accurately, give or take a few reservoirs hidden in the strata of the soil like natural wellsprings.  She took sparks into her lungs with a long breath, and tried to focus on the data points scrawled in his hooked handwriting, like as it was to poetry written in mathematics.

 

Something was immediately, deeply, _terribly_ wrong.

 

Jyera crouched amid a carpet of stubborn grasses, smoothing out and pressing the parchment flat against an open page of the tome with one hand, fishing for her stylus with the other. She heard the shuffle of Cid adjusting his posture, but he retained his silence otherwise. In trembling script she dotted out the loci around her that raised a cacophony of alarums in her head. She struggled to even think through what impressions these points in space sat so ill with her. They were like desiccated sores at the end stage of a wasting, ostracising disease; like shriveled patches of salted soil that forbade even the hardiest, least edibly tough tubers to grow. How an aetherial space could feel so _empty--_

 

Gently, the pinching, rubbing sound of bending leather stirred her out of the trance. She looked up to find Cid beside her, sitting on his haunches, elbows propped on his knees. He wore another indiscernible expression--the laboratory scientist, taking observations in the field. “Found something, did you?”, he prompted, softly.

 

“Errr-hum. I-I don’t know--yes--b-but I can’t, I’m not sure how to explain it at-at-all…”

 

A deep furrow took hold of his forehead; faintly, she could even see the most proximal thread of his eyebrows hoisted aloft, so deeply its seat was pressing on the bone underneath. “You look as though you will be sick, primarily, I suppose. Shall I--”

 

“No! N-no, let me try. I did find something. I did; a _lot_ of something.” She took a deep breath, which turned into a tight gulp on its way down her lungs. She only shook her head and mumbled, “One does not drain a well sideways.”

 

“Unless he’s taken a spade too hard to the garden a few fulms away, no,” he agreed. “How does that relate to what you found?” It was asked in plain, expectant curiosity.

 

Jyera had not realised she was holding her breath, and she spat it out now. “I--I can’t draw the way it’s moving on a map this time. It doesn’t work that way this time.” He kept his gaze on her, resolute, uncharacteristically patient for the nonce. “It’s…” She began to gesture wildly with her arms, a pantomime morbol of frustrated translation. “An upside-down river. A waterfall running diagonally, where there should be wind. And it has no flavour at all!”

 

He snorted. A pair they certainly made, she and her, a _tour de force_ of subtlety and reserve.

 

“Are you a human aetherometer truly, then?”, he asked through a dark chuckle. “Nay, I mean no offense by that. ‘Twould only explain a… thing or two.” The laughter slid from his face as she remained fixed in an uncomfortable-looking mimicry of wind-blasted tree. “Shall we keep moving?”

 

Jyera nodded slowly, dazed.

 

As dusk came and then went, they walked the perimeter of each cardinal direction from their landing site. Jyera shifted the note-taking duty to Cid, who eyed her with quiet bewilderment as she meandered from point to point. At length he caught up to her, just in time to see her cheeks blanched and her eyes glazing over. “Oh, bloody hells, woman, why did you not say something? You look like you’ve caught your death, for godssakes.” He set down the fieldnotes and stood at eye level to her. Lines of concern worked their way around the hollows of his eyes, either side of his nose; shadows, gathering at the slopes of his frown.

 

“Here. Come on, now, that’s plenty of readings. I shall spare you the agony of waiting for the results and be blunt--every one of them is very bad news. Now that that is out of the way--I am going to take us back. Alright?” He leaned toward her, offering his shoulder.

 

Jyera groped for it, dizzy, her hands clasping onto his jacket after a few tries. “Oh--thank you,” she said, slurring a bit. Rather unexpectedly, he stood up to his full height, drawing one of her arms round to his other shoulder.

 

“Just like that, aye. Now, don’t you let go. Ready?” She nodded, hazily. She strangely liked having her toes dangle midair as he adjusted to the difference between their heights.

 

“...Alright, that’s a little less balanced than it would have been with two people, but you should be able to lean while we walk, at least.” Her other arm retreated to her side. Cid knelt to pick up their belongings, and guided her in the direction of the ship. She found that even with the strain of the funny angle at which he had to hold her up, the warmth and strength of his neck and shoulders was very much welcome.

 

They were less than halfway to Enterprise when her head lolled to the side and went limp against his upper arm. Jyera felt her cheek hit the muscle there--also warm--and as her other senses dimmed, she thought she could hear him start a little.

  
“Oh, bugger, is _that_ aether sickness…?”


	12. :.::_ so falls a candle o'er curtain of night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FiNALLY. Grad school is a lot of work, kids.

“Better?”

 

Jyera blinked dimly, searching for the source of the voice. On finding it, the haze in her vision receded, and she simply stared through him. Slowly, she nodded, and began sitting up straight. “Seven hells, that was fast,” he added. “Suppose you weren’t thrown off badly enough to stay knocked out, eh?” 

 

She looked around her to find that he had brought them back to  _ Enterprise _ , and only just moments before, at that. He gave the hammer and oilcloth in his hands a wistful look, tucking the latter into the mouth of a nearby toolkit and sheathing the former in its place at his hip. “I’m afraid we’ve to be on our way ere much longer, but before we take off, allow me to ask, if you would--are you all right?” 

 

Jyera rubbed uneasily at her temples and winced. Hells of a headache, this was, one of the sort that makes one so groggy and unsteady that the whole experience is an exercise in precisely how nauseated the average body could be without actually retching. “I--yes, I think so. I’m not certain what happened just now.”   

 

Cid knitted his brows, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “I was reminded of reports I have seen of so-named ‘aether sickness’, but this was a touch too fleeting to fit that description. Whatever it is you’re doing to process ambient aether gradients, it seems to leave the door open in both directions, so to speak. Ah--and you dropped this.” He snapped open one of the smaller pockets on his belt and retrieved the little carved trinket to which she was inexplicably quite attached. “I might not have even noticed it fall from your hands when you went limp on me, were it not for the inscription.” 

 

Her eyes widened. “Do you mean you know what this is?”, she asked with an awed whisper. A hope that pinched at her stomach stirred inside her at the prospect.

 

“Nay. I know what it reminds me of, but mayhap it is a superficial resemblance.” He fastened the button of the pocket closed and folded his arms contemplatively. “I hear tell of the odd adventurer whose merit in their chosen discipline attracts the more esoteric records of their mentors. A stone like that would act as a sort of focus for such training, but yours may be simply a homage to the craftsmanship of such stones.” He rolled his neck a little, squinting and shaking off a twitch of what looked like fatigue. “‘Tis only a guess, however. Nevertheless… it feels strange to behold it. I would keep it hidden, were I you.” He paused, as though an idea occurred to him that he subsequently snuffed as one does to a nearly-forgotten candle. 

 

Jyera took a closer look at the inscription in the jagged flake of polished jade. That was, if it were made of jade truly, or else another such softly radiant green gem. Such a glum nostalgia it filled her with; a tart sweetness to flavour the nausea she seemed to feel every time she meditated upon the inscription too deeply. 

 

“Wait--what did I help find just now, again?”, she asked, perking up suddenly. 

Cid blinked innocently before the question finished processing. He then lit up like a boy at his first  _ eureka  _ and fumbled with another folded slip of parchment, scratching something into its grooves. “Ah! I nearly forgot, anxious as I am to get back to headquarters and piece together the whole gory bloody puzzle! Ahaha! Here,” he offered, animatedly holding out his gloved hand to her, the scrimshaw gospel in his palm. 

 

As she took it from him she noticed more keenly the oddly comforting warmth and wear of the gauntlet, its stitched squares rounded over the curves of his long fingers. He was standing closer to her than before--unless it was just that she was paying more attention. As if there were more attention to pay to a person who nearly stops one’s heart dead when first they meet. 

 

The next sensation was less pleasant. Thorned vines crawled into the pit of her stomach as she looked over the dreaded confirmation of her first guesses. The map was marked overtop a tracing of the previous version, and it was uglier now; the putrid shadow of Dalamud, as it seemed from the parasitised bleeding of the land’s aether reservoirs, was dragging toward a corner of Eorzea that Jyera did not recognise. It scraped the border of northern Thanalan, where the terrain began to turn ugly and craggy, and folded down into the skirts of Mor Dhona at a poorly charted no-man’s-zone. She was about to conclude she had been wrong when Cid spoke up again, her own words on his lips. 

 

“I don’t recognise it all too readily, myself, but I agree--it’s a peculiar choice. I would have expected Silvertear to be in the picture more than it seems it is, given the Empire’s investment in it in the past. They are acting fast…” He bowed his head, his movements burdened as he stirred Enterprise to life. “Shall we be off?”

 

Jyera had little say in what burst out of her next. “So--! So it worked! What I felt was actually--I picked up on something real after all!” As heavy as the implications were, there was delight in this reification. Cid looked over at her excitement, an innocent wonder on his face; and then, to a mixture of her surprise and her impatient relief, he smiled. It pushed his eyes up into sharp bows of light blue joy, and softened every harsh angle of the shadows that dwelled there. 

 

“Aye. And though I fear what aught to do next, I now count this among my blessings. Come on, then; ready to fly again?”

 

“What did I tell you about ordering me around?”, she teased. 

 

Cid threw his head back and laughed with the full echo of his lungs, his hair a silver avalanche as his shoulders shook, and he turned the crank for the engine to come on.

 

~~~

 

She stood at the siding of the ship, but not out of fear, this time. Her hands were resting on the beveled surface, while the rest of her peered down over the land that just earlier that day she had been petrified to look at. It was not unlike the old adage she had heard, that, once one has learned how to sail a boat, the knowledge could go rusty but never be lost. She wondered if it really was the same for learning to ride in an airship. 

 

“Where are we going now?” 

 

She fielded the question plainly enough. 

 

“I had a mind to wander off to Gridania for a piece of intelligence your adventurer friends were kind enough to deliver,” he said gravely. Whatever it was he knew of the information the cadre must have found, it sat poorly with him. “But I realise Vylbrand to Thanalan is quite long enough a sojourn for one day. I can ill afford to wait, but--”

 

“Then don’t!” 

 

The face to which Cid turned shone with bright conviction. Jyera stood up to her full height--the underwhelming extent of which placed her defiant chin at level with the pendant around his neck--and scribbled determination into the flexion of her brows. “You have an accelerating problem of crystals draining off to  _ wherever _ , and turning wild animals mutant, and distorting the weather. If it is as urgent as both your testimony and my findings suggest, I would be guilty of  _ abandoning  _ its progression to its natural conclusion were I to sleep on it as though I am only a daylight volunteer.” She hoped the brand she felt glowing hot in the coals of her eyes was visible to him. 

 

He only stared at her in passive, exhausted contemplation for a moment. Slowly he stood back from the wheel of the ship and sighed, letting go of the burnished wood and brass grips. He did not look up as he fielded her a question in as grey-brick a tone as fatigue would allow. 

 

“So. You are truly set on this path?”   
  
“I am.”

 

Tension slipped out of the back of his neck, his shoulders dropping. Cid lifted his head, eyes opening on her. “I had thought perhaps that a few hours of fieldwork would make or break your original decision. ‘Tisn’t a grand adventure, by any means… on its own. Yet,” he began, a little warmer, “I doubted myself about that as well. I--really cannot stress enough that it will not be the life that you might have imagined when you picked up your first guildleve--”   
  
“I hate guildleves,” she said plainly.

 

Cid’s nose gave a funny twitch, as he shook his head and failed to contain the spread of a smile. “Ah, well, when you put it that way… aye. But I will warn you; while it has been critical that you and I obtain these readings, the project cannot end with sampling and measuring. I have… reasons… to suspect the Empire is facilitating these changes, as you will recall. What troubles me now is first, how, and second, why is it continuing apace and ever more rapidly…?”

 

Folding his arms must be an anxious habit of his, Jyera wondered, for he was doing it again now and frowning like a man trying his best to feign alertness. Only, just as that thought concluded, he surprised her again. A worn-down, earnest smile was aimed in her direction, and the sense of anxious distance between them dissipated like spider silk under heavy rain. “I shall have to bite my tongue ere I spend all of myself on idle speculation, however. To Gridania, then?”

 

Jyera leapt a surprising height from the planks of the ship for joy. “Straightaway! Engage!” 

 

His smile turned into a playful smirk as he retook the wheel. “Aye aye, captain. We should arrive there before the sun comes up, but not long before. I am hoping you will use the time to rest… for my part, I am certain I’ll try to.” 

 

She paused during the last spring of her toes, her hand hooked over her chin. “Oh--before I forget. What is the intelligence you’re anticipating about?” She walked close enough to him to peer at an angle up into his face, poised like a curious parrot with an innocuously poor sense of personal space. 

 

“...From Ala Mhigo. A legatus of Garlemald of whom I know little offhand. Something is… off about the accounts I’ve received so far. But that shall have to be tomorrow’s riddle.”

 

A tensile silence accompanied the two of them for the remainder of the flight. Jyera did not leave her place beside him, she would later realise, until they drifted apart at the airship landing, and she landed on an inn bed just as the red blight of the moon was smothered by the crest of the rising sunlight.

 

~

 

“I’m neither a conjurer nor a chirurgeon,” he started, “But I know what a mind dazed with hunger looks like. Come on, now, it would do you well to tuck in while we have a moment.”

 

Jyera stared lopsidedly at the admittedly pleasing fare in front of her; a sort of Gridanian walnut-flour crepe, with plenty of savory trimmings folded into it. The tremor in her stomach gave her away, and soon every forkful of the offering was winding blissfully down into it. When she chanced to look at anything other than her plate and the tines of her utensils, it was to spot Cid working on the last bite of whatever he’d chosen for himself, the back of his hand politely concealing his mouth as he finished the thing up. 

 

“Thank you,” Jyera offered, a touch embarrassed with herself. Cid only waved away her self-consciousness with a serene nod, starting in on the task looming over their heads. 

 

“I’m afraid the nature of the information that’s been retrieved is actually of a different procurement than I originally described. I will be following up with… with a man who was long undercover in Ala Mhigo, rather than a missive. You are welcome, of course, to come along, but I tell you this in advance on the chance that he’ll say naught with an unfamiliar face around.”

 

“You have met him before?” 

 

Cid knitted the space between his brows together. “Aye, and he wasn’t of a speaking mood at the time. Now, however, I’m told he is willing to divulge what he knows.” 

 

She leaned in her seat with her arms folded, her mind teeming. “What comes out of Ala Mhigo that will help with Meteor?” As soon as she’d let the name slip, she scrunched into herself, eyes flitting around nervously as though she’d uttered some grave offense that would exact swift retribution from anyone who heard. 

 

“Not Meteor specifically… or so I thought. I have heard about a legatus stationed in the eastern front--Othard, not Aldenard--being brought to Gyr Abania in recent months. There’s a bigger picture here than simply loading more invading squadrons onto Eorzean shores, I fear, however.” 

 

There was a long pause as the morning sunlight reached the line of the large mosaic windows of the Carline Canopy, casting a dreamy afterglow on the dining space. Dust motes turned into gleaming flecks of sand in the low streams of light. It caught some of Cid’s features in its aura, becoming kaleidoscopic flashes of the metal and glass of his goggles, gathering in the waves of white gold that framed his face. When the quiet was next interrupted, Jyera mourned that its magic had withdrawn from time. 

 

~

 

The pair made their way through the dim wooden walkways of Gridania, guided more by the fireflies that gathered round the lamps throughout the city than by the sky overhead, occluded as it was by the deep dark of the forest. Some of the passersby stumbled into one another as Cid strode quietly by them, and once in every other while, Jyera thought she heard his name pierce the other sounds of the forest. It was for naught to pause to listen; the engineer had turned as grave and cold as a statue in his haste, storm clouds boiling in the shadows that fell over the bridge of his nose and cheekbones. His pace did not slow the entire leg of the stretch between the Carline and wherever it was he expected to meet with his contact. 

 

Gridania had not seemed so endless and fraught with disorganised tunnels on her first stay in the city. Jyera wondered how much of that was simple habituation--Limsa Lominsa’s chaos was largely vertical, open to the air--and how much might have been attributable to her post-accident daze. Her cheeks went hot at the thought that she might have to tell him about that at some point, for that matter...

 

“Well! Look here, it’s our Jyera!”, called a claret voice light with joy. “I did wonder when you would come round this part of the world again. How have you liked the adventuring life so far, mm? And--” 

 

“Ondina,” it dawned on her, and she brightened in return. “I’m--er, at the moment, actually preoccupied--” 

 

Cid had, however, gradually slowed his steps, and now stopped as though the sound of the conjurer’s voice calling for Jyera had knocked him over the head. His expression was stiff with taciturn anxiety, but he could not keep the curiosity out of it, and one of his white brows arched with the slight tilt of his head in her direction. 

 

“Ah--! This is Ondina. She was my conjury instructor before I came to Vylbrand.” Jyera made a welcoming gesture toward her, which earned her a dignified bow from the waist. “And you look well, what’s more. Is that the ribbon from your convalescence?”, the older woman inquired.

 

Jyera nodded. The conjurer was terse and swift while attending the injured and the ill, but in every other instance communicating with the woman, Jyera had become quite familiar with the chipper barrages of questions that usually went with her conversation. “I liked it,” she added. 

 

“Splendid,” Ondina sighed, seeming strangely proud of her former charge. “It does seem I’ve caught you at a busy time, however…?”

 

Cid inclined his head down in a posture of humility and answered for her. “My apologies, Conjurer Ondina. Jyera was accompanying me in retrieving some research materials; in my haste, I’ve made no proper introduction. It is urgent, all the same--I must be away. Perhaps we will speak again?”

 

The older woman waved him off affably with a second bow, apparently not the worse even if she had taken offense to any of it. Once he was out of earshot, she gave Jyera a coy nudge. “Now, who is this you’re working with? Interesting fellow.”

 

“Uhm--that’s--Master Garlond. Cid Garlond.” Jyera had found herself tripping over the specter of his formalities, ungracefully introducing the man who had begun to vanish over the hilltop path.

 

Ondina’s brows flew up into her hairline, and she withdrew an arm from underneath the heavy curtain of willow branches and pressed soap blossoms (so nicknamed for the way their roots and petals crushed into a satisfying scrubbing agent under the insistences of a mortar and pestle) to fasten it at her hip. 

 

“Really! ...I thought he would be shorter. And louder.”

 

“What--”

 

“And maybe smoke a pipe. I didn’t imagine he’d be so well-groomed, either, for that matter…” A wicked humor glittered in the woman’s eyes, and Jyera realised her own expression must have looked quite stupid with her mouth agape in awkward disbelief. Ondina laughed and gave her shoulder a reassuring rub. “I will be back and forth between the Carline and the chirurgery. I do hope you’ll have a moment for tea before you’re whisked away again?” She left Jyera with an encouraging wink. 

 

Jyera wandered up the path to catch up with Cid, wondering what it was the wink was supposed to encourage.

 

~

 

The man, as it turned out, was a jittery spy recently returned from Ala Mhigo, where he had suffered undercover among imperial frontline infantry, and he was in no mood to entertain a guest to their interview. So it was that Jyera sat impatiently, anxiously, beneath the awning of a nearby pavilion, taking no comfort in the glade-tradition woodworked chair in which she was planted. 

 

When Cid finally returned, she sprang from it and sprinted toward him. 

 

“What did you learn? Did he say--” She stopped herself, which was somewhat unusual of her, she realised, but it was for no pithy reason. Cid had looked harried on the way to their meeting; what he looked now was haunted and sick. She stared into him, searching with eyes that darted all round his face for clues.

 

“Worse than I thought he would. Loath as I am to say it, we are much further behind in step than the Empire is at present.” He exhaled, long and strained. “Aye, I’m feeling the long night now. Managed to doze off for a bit before I went to fetch you a breakfast, but--” He shuddered, his muscles shivering thereafter. “Godsdammit.” 

 

“Go. Rest.” She was surprised to find herself confident in her demands. “You won’t be able to fly us back to Vylbrand if you crash her on the way.” Cid groaned into his glove as he passed the hand that wore it down his face. 

 

“I make no promises--save to try,” he acquiesced, a gruff muttering as it was. 

 

Jyera beamed with relief at that. “I’ll go see if the Wailers and Adders have anything out of the ordinary in their recent reports. I’m certain there must be something we can use.” Cid nodded, a bit absent. “Sound thinking,” he added. 

 

She hesitated as soon as she was a few yalms away from him, a warmth in her breastbone urging her to look back. He had slowly stood up, all but shuffling in the direction of someplace to rest. It occurred to her once she was through a tunnel connecting to the walkway of the Adders’ Nest that it was possible this was routine to him; working continuously on as little full sleep as he could safely tolerate. The idea chewed on her stomach. It would be too easy to make a lethal mistake, staying so perpetually worn. 

 

She stared at her hands. Hues of illuminated foliage cast a green pearlescence on everything and on everyone in the wooded city, and the effect was mesmerising. Her meditations were quickly interrupted by a scolding from another familiar voice.

 

“ _ Oi _ ! About time we caught up with you!” The bard scurried up the walkway with a look of chastising concern. “We should really fetch you a linkpearl, Jyera. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.  _ Gods _ , but it’s good to see you. What brought you out here?” Her ears twitched eagerly under the wide brim of her feathered hat. 

 

“Oh! Master Garlond--”

 

J’rhoomale’s mouth curled into a conspiratorial grin and drew a gauntleted hand up to scratch her chin, feigning ignorance. “Ohoho, is  _ that _ the sort of adventure you meant.”

 

Heat drowned Jyera’s face up to her ears. “No, no, not that! I mean that we were working at field tests until late at night, and then--”

 

“Pay ‘er no mind, lass, she’s full of it today,” the gruff voice of their knight interjected. “It i’nt so important what the specifics were. Lucky we ran into ye, all the same.” He was smiling, but it was nervous in a way Jyera could not quite pin.

 

The bard pouted and crossed her arms, but went on. “Right, well. We lot are here to visit a sagely-like fellow the Maelstrom doesn’t trust all too well. Don’t know why we couldn’t just invite the old dear for a drink and then get the truth out of him whilst he’s down in his cups, but--”

 

The paladin shot her an impatient look. “Err, that is, one way or t’other, the scholarly’s to be found uptown at Apkallu Falls. It’s a task I wager was intended for our full group, so mayhap you’ll come along now?” 

 

It caught Jyera offguard, and she paused long enough trying to queue together in her mind what duties needed attending before others that the bard’s expression changed from something like “let’s go!” to one best summarised as “pretty please”. She took a deep breath and made up her mind.

 

“You can count on me.” Just then, J’hroomale raised a finger, bringing her tail and the points of her ears up with it, and added, “Oh, actually, this will be our second visit with him. Funny elder Sharlayan, he is, name of Louisoix, and we’re supposed to go a-hunting some big beastie we needed extra supplies for.” Jyera went slightly numb for a moment as the bard excitedly pulled something from her pack and gave it a hearty toss toward her. “Lucky for you, we did the hard part already!”, she explained cheerfully, just as the object collided with Jyera’s forehead and fell into her fumbling hands.

 

“What… is this sword for?”

 

“ _ Flambeau _ , they call it. I’m no the man to tell ye how it works in detail, but we had ourselves a day of it picking off hunt targets just to get to the damned thing. S’posed to open some manner of door, so says the Sharlayan,” their companion answered, following the clanking of his armor as he crossed his arms.

 

Jyera swallowed. J’hroomale, on the other hand, did not seem intimidated, nor indeed to have spotted her apprehension, and beckoned with a confident bounce in her step for Jyera to come along. 

 

She hoped Cid had taken her advice to heart. Suddenly she, herself, felt inadequately rested. 

 

~

 

The Falls were more tranquil and more mystically beautiful than she expected. Enormous lotuses and water lilies gathered round the rocks over which a gentle crystal-bright stream ran, shimmering with the lantern light and the flutter of moth’s wings, small butterflies, and motes of free wind aether. Standing at the center of this quietude was the elderly gentleman she recalled from her first stay in the city, and the same feeling washed over her again. He simply  _ knew _ her. But why?

 

“Ah! I see you have returned with the Inferno Flambeau. Well done, my young friends.” A sagely smile warmed the man’s furrowed brown face. “Now naught stands between you and a reckoning with the primal.” 

 

Jyera’s heart rate rose dramatically. She was not expecting conscription to fight such an apparition. She was not, moreover, expecting to be drafted into a tussle of any sort. Instinctively her hands plunged into the hidden pockets of her robe, one hand clutching around the irregular facets of her lucky jewel. 

 

She massaged the grooves of the sigil set into it when a series of quaking reverberations manifested around the group. One by one, incapacitated soldiers of various origins ported in and fell to the ground like lifeless popoto sacks. Her blood cooled to the level of an abandoned bowl of soup. 

 

“...Behold. The fate of those who went before you. Not a soul who has raised a hand against Ifrit has yet to prevail. Attend me, all of you: anything less than complete focus upon your task, and your fates shall be no different. If you are prepared to accept this, pray hand me the flambeau.”

 

Jyera turned to J’hroomale, whose ear-to-ear grin had turned to such self-effacing hope for mercy that it pinched the brown stripes of her cheeks up into her hair. “ _ What did I just agree to do? _ ” Jyera hissed, petrified. 

 

“Small popotoes! I swear it! Just cast like you did when you gave Naillebert that bludgeoning and we’ll be done in no time,” the miqo’te murmured back to her. 

 

Arbert nodded for the rest of them, coming forward with the crooked blade. Jyera rubbed briefly at the tender spot where it had made contact with her face. 

 

“Be calm and unclouded of mind,” Louisoix encouraged in a gentle timbre, and Jyera felt the  _ unpeeling  _ sensation of an aetherial gate folding open. She must have opened the door inside her without realising it, she thought. It was several more seconds before the glow of the portal became visible.

 

“Do this, and you may yet prevail.” 

 

In her anxiety, Jyera barged ahead and leapt through the fabric of the gateway.  _ Now or never _ . 

 

It was like stepping into an overfull brick oven, only worse, as if someone had shoved her face forward into the coals of the cookfire themselves. As her teammates gathered around her, drawing their weapons, Jyera felt for some implement or another with which to cast her own, dissatisfiedly finding the neck of her cudgel, the metal almost too hot to hold. 

 

She cast a look skyward and found no more courage there. Though the smoke blotted out the evil blister from the heavens, she was treated to the final sliver of Thanalan sunlight as a black eclipse closed around it. 

 

The aspected roulette in her palms whirred. 

 

_ What have I gotten myself into? _

 

~~~~~


	13. ||: damned if you do

White-hot embers sailed and screeched past her ears. Jyera’s lungs clenched tight under the pyroclastic hail, driving out smoke. To cough, to gasp; even to quickly restore feeling to the points of her fingers, having made a leap of faith to avoid the yawning igneous chasms that formed over the battlefield; the air itself, breath itself, was just  _ too hot _ , as though a bellows flushed mouthful after mouthful of flames down her throat. 

 

She was beginning to feel herself panic when a salve of Lamimi’s prayers eased the worst of the smarting, scorching pain from her scored cheeks.  _ With a mind calm and unclouded… _

 

Jyera burrowed her nose into her sleeve, holding it out in front of her face, and tried to keep her watering eyes from blinding her. The ‘ _ beastie _ ’--a primal, the carnival effigy of a fire-revering society--had a few habits that struck her as familiar. Largely, they involved survivors avoiding getting turned into campfire gruel; those few that didn’t caused another itch to open in the back of Jyera’s mind. Ifrit was  _ predictable _ . 

 

A small blessing, but a vital one, she thought, throwing herself into a duck-and-roll that granted her permission to keep all of her fingers and toes. The steel alloys of longsword and battleaxe screamed on contact with claws of live, roasting fury, refusing to bend to the primal’s will every bit as much as their wielders did.  _ Just do it like you did versus Naillebert… _

 

There was a moment of brief awareness--that ignited linen smelled as acrid and disappointing as the knowledge it was her own garments that were burning. Then the world went quiet and slow as if someone had poured bubble serum over the encounter, and the sorcery that had no name returned to her. Serenely, Jyera looked up into the mask of barely-cooled magma that held the rage of the Inferno.

 

She would not recall what forms her lips had made to call on the energies that guided her strike. Only that when she finally did it, she struck true, and the dummy god cracked, becoming boulders of ash--and then, becoming next to nothing. 

 

The group slowly helped each other up from the ground, pinching out whisker fires here and there and attending to bashed knees and toasted elbows, the delight of victory dawning on them all one by one. 

 

Jyera felt J’hroomale fling her slender arms around her and leap in place. “Ah! What did I tell you! We did it,  _ we did it _ !”, the miqo’te cried, and Jyera found her joy rather infectious. 

 

Yet. Something was not as it should be, she sensed, and gradually, merely  _ knew _ . The apparition should have simply dissipated in all directions like wind from an expired balloon, but instead--

 

Her eyes snapped skyward, open saucers of dread. Surely enough, there was the murderous, splitting headache; the one that felt like crimson pulses, a heartbeat inside her brain, utterly foreign and monstrous, and--and  _ familiar _ . 

The swaying clank of some metal she could not identify offhand interrupted her doubts, sharing space on the ears with the sound of leather-like gloves clapping out sarcastic drama. 

 

“ _ Bravo _ , young warriors. Tell me”, called the silvery voice that haunted her dreams, “I would know the name of they who slew the beastmen’s god.”    

 

Jyera swallowed, hard, but felt one defiant foot step in front of her, and then the other, until her companions were one full pace behind her.

“It wasn’t just one person.”

She tensed at the collective flinching behind her, and the crunch of J’hroomale’s boots taking hesitant steps toward her.

“The primal fell because we were looking out for one another,” Jyera finished, trying to smother the tremor in her voice with loud steel girding.

The figure across the sand was motionless for a number of seconds, looking all the more and eerier like an unliving silver figment of war to come. Then came the surreal contralto she had heard before. “An heroic testament to the  _ virtue of teamwork _ …? I see. A sentimentality I shall not soon forget.”

Jyera wanted, with every fiber of her person, to be unafraid of the armored phantom. So much so, that a rising anger began to burn through the pit of her stomach; but it did nothing to stop the trembling in her shoulders, down through her arms and knees. Raising a gauntleted arm to the group, the speaker continued apace.

“But I suppose I shall do you the favour of playing my part.”

Jyera felt the miqo’te’s hand squeeze her shoulder, half  _ let’s get out of here  _ and half  _ I’ve got you _ . She could not make her eyes leave the regal, menacing soldier in front of her.

If one could tell a smile through metal by the sound of a voice, Jyera was sure she heard one.

“I am Nael van Darnus.”

Her blood was freezing.

“Legatus of the Seventh Imperial Legion of Garlemald. And I am here to bear the light of salvation to the peoples of Eorzea.”

“ _ Salvation _ ?”, her mouth said, largely without her permission, and unable to hold back its near-hysterical treble.

“Much as it _warms my heart_ to know that even now, some souls labor to preserve life in this land by the blood of fallen eikons… it is a hopeless struggle.” The legatus’ fist closed, and Jyera noticed for the first time that the fingers of the gauntlet were adorned with silver claws. “The odds of your survival are _null_ … unless you accept the outstretched hand of the Garlean Empire.”

“That’s  _ noble talk  _ coming from the selfsame folk who kill and enslave us!”, J’hroomale cried, her nails now digging into the fabric of Jyera’s sleeve. The legatus merely turned to look at her briefly, answering in the same silken timbre.

“I am well aware that the inhabitants of this land view the Empire as no better than starveling mongrels who covet their territory… but the truth could not be farther away.” A few of the plainer soldiers shifted their stances, some lifting their heads higher at the prideful words. “The evil blight of the eikons strikes land after land; seeing this, we were moved to act and bring them their deliverance.”

_ That decision was not yours to make _ , Jyera thought, frozen.

“Ours is the radiance that shall banish the darkness that threatens to engulf this land! So the light has decreed--and so it shall be!” The legatus threw both arms skyward, a gesture of triumph before victory, in Jyera’s mind.

The veil of numbness by fear was torn from her as the imposing figure began to speak words that were senselessly familiar. 

 

“ _ Ne’er til land consumes sun can sea bear moons. Heavens spew crimson flame; hells seep black dooms. _ ” 

 

She could almost feel the curl of a zealous sneer forming beneath the silver of the legatus’ armor. Her mouth had opened at some reflexive point during the recitation, waiting to speak, her traitorously obvious expression widening. One of her feet lumbered tremulously forward. Plate metal shoulders shook with a low bout of laughter as the legatus reached for the halberd latched there, bringing it slowly down into position. 

 

“I see the words are not entirely lost upon  _ some _ of you. Yet you do not appear to understand them, either.” A sigh blew through the mechanical filter of the helm’s mouthpiece. “That so many children of this land should grow up ignorant of the words of prophecy… The slumbering emperors of old Allag must be turning in their graves.”

 

Jyera’s hand shook as it dove into the lining of her robe and clutched at her engraved green stone. There was a musicality to the lamentation that made her feel strangely as if it could see straight through to the little trinket, and for reasons that refused to surface in her logic, that vulnerability was chilling.

 

“I shall do you the favour of explaining it as I would to a child of Garlemald,” the voice purred, the strange halberd still pointed ominously in her vague direction. “I do not hold you responsible for your ancestors’ ignorance, after all.

 

...Naught is eternal. Not even the celestial dance of stars upon the astral sea.  _ The hour of reckoning is at hand.  _ The crimson star will soon descend, and when it does, this tainted land will be purified. Oh--! But what foul shadows will the souls of the unredeemed among you cast, once exposed to the light of judgment?”   
  
Now Jyera was truly alarmed, and she could feel J’hroomale begin to tug firmly at her to pull her back to the rest of the group. In rapid succession, a current of disorienting aetherial pain passed by her, the halberd took on an eerie radiance, and the legatus crowed. “ _ The mere imagining of it cuts me to the quick! _ ”

 

The other soldiers themselves recoiled in fright as Nael van Darnus fired--a  _ gunhalberd _ , Jyera thought, not an ordinary arm--a storm’s surge of aetherial current tearing down the portal that had brought her and her companions over from Apkallu Falls. Her vision whited out under the onslaught, and she was next aware only of the sensation of a helpful tug at her collar.

 

She blinked, still seeing double through a haze of detonated energy. 

 

A sturdy hand was offered to her to help her stand up--she hadn’t realised she’d even fallen, for that matter--and when the searing blindness abated, Gridania sprang up around her. The Archon--Louisoix--nodded to her with a concerned look on his face. 

 

“The portal node--it was--that halberd tore it to pieces--”, Jyera said deliriously, still not certain she could feel her toes or see straight. “They can’t do that, can they--? All of that aether, just--gone--”   
  
“Slow yourself, young mistress,” the Archon’s voice responded, patient and even. “I’ve retrieved the lot of you, and on generally happy terms, I think; the primal is fallen and you are unharmed.” He cracked a sagely smile at her. “If a bit singed on the edges. But there’s more to the tale, is there not?”

 

She stood up from shaky knees and took in the scene of the falls. All her limbs were in one place; nothing was out of phase. The moving water calmly muttered its way down the creek and into the little waterfalls, coasting lazily in the pool below. Gridania’s miasmic green shade softened her eyesight. All as if she hadn’t been ripped through an energy-starved hole in the fabric of space mere moments before. 

 

“It’s just as Jyera said,” Arbert interjected. “The imperial--a legatus, introduced as Nael van Darnus--fired some sort of wave that sapped the gate shut behind us. I don’t know how she knows it, but Jyera’s been right before when we thought something was happening to the aether around us. If she says it was sucked dry, I believe her.” 

 

The older elezen brooded silently for a few moments. Jyera’s vision had settled back into place, and she was beginning to think clearly again. 

 

“...So Nael van Darnus appeared in the flesh. Not only that, then, moreover, but able to casually sever an aetherial bond altogether and drain it clear out of the land? Twelve forbid it… the Empire must have some fearful new weapon. How it was possible to do at all, however…” He shook his head, greyed-ivory hair bristling. Not for the first time, Jyera’s eyes were fixated on a remarkable tattoo emblazoned over the man’s cranium, and her thoughts were about to wander away guessing what it meant when another proposition caught her attention. 

 

“Oh! Oh! We could ask Master Garlond!”, J’hroomale called out from behind her. “Master Cid Garlond! He’s got all this research going on with, ah, something about the crystals and how they’re draining funny--”   
  
“You know of someone versed in the behaviour of crystals?”, the Archon said incredulously, his head emerging from drooping so quickly that a tiny jangle chimed out from the pierced talisman in his long ear. 

 

“Aye, Jyera here’s been helping him with it, all gallivanting off to look after the things--”   
  
“...I have heard that name in my travels. I think I should like to meet this man, indeed. For now… that so soon after the summoning of a primal entity, the land should bleed so greatly, I fear worse ought lie ahead if a re-summoning were to be attempted… I shall have to consult the literature on the matter.” The Archon stood slowly and reset his grip on the tall staff he bore with him, brushing off his tunic out of nicety and habit. “And I thank you all for your bravery in this matter. Avail yourselves of all insight that you can--we will need it ere long.” He turned another strangely knowing smile on Jyera, who had forgotten she was staring. 

 

With a dignified bow to the group, Louisoix Leveilleur made his exit, a subtle nod to Jyera as he withdrew into the shade. Something, Jyera guessed. Something about her, the scholar seemed to just  _ know _ . 

 

A friendly nudge shook her out of it. “That sounds like your cue to go and fetch Master Garlond, doesn’t it?”, Arbert fetched, cheerfully. Though, frowning contemplatively, he added, “...He’ll probably want to know about that legatus. I think I would, were I him.”    
  
“I’m thinking I will give him as much detail as I can. That was…” She let the remark trail off, in the end. The root of the problem with that encounter was precisely that so many layers occurred at once, it was hard to name the problem in the first place. 

  
Their group parted ways at the end of the path to the city’s center, waving Jyera off enthusiastically as she made for the airship landing. She was sure after that much elapsed time that that was where he would be found.   
~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh gods I'm sorry this gets updated so slowly! It's been a rough up and down time, but I got myself unstuck... Apologies it ends in a weird place, I just couldn't let it drag too much!


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